So, you want to get that link?

But is it up to scratch? To tie the first few posts all together, I’m going to do a quick checklist for making sure you’re choosing a good link that’s going to benefit your site.

• Moz Rank – Look at the Moz Rank of the domain, as well as the page that the link is on. Inlinks from a highly ranked domain will pass on much more ‘link juice’ than links from a poorly ranked domain.
• Moz Trust - Similar to above, look at both the domain and the page scores. Trusted sites will obviously pass on more trust than untrusted sites. Seed sites, such as the BBC, academic institutions and .gov domains all have very high levels of trust, so getting your Press Release released onto one of those outlets is invaluable.
• Amount of links on the page already – A page only has a certain amount of link juice and trust to pass down to its links, so if there are 30 links on the page, each links will get around one thirtieth of that link juice.
• Doman Penalisation – Use Netcraft toolbar suggested in Top 5 Link Building Plugins, to see if the domain has a risk rating factor above 2 or 3. This is when you should be a little sceptical about the trustworthiness of the domain. Also, if you can identify the domain being part of a bad network from reciprocal links all pointing to the same IP address, steer clear!
• Site Relevancy – If the target website isn’t particularly relevant, don’t instantly dismiss the opportunity to get a link, but do look further into the deeper pages on the domain to see if your ideal keywords are anywhere to be seen in an article or blog post. Having a link from the relevant keywords, so long as they are in context, will do just as well as any ordinary link for ranking and trust levels.
• Link Location on Page – Not exactly each link on the page gets an equal share, because links at the top of pages will get more people focussing on them, there is a slight weighting towards these links in Google’s algorithm. Of course this is negligible, so any location is a good location so long as the other factors are in your favour!

I hope this checklist will be of use to you all, even if it’s just for reference now and again. Stay tuned for the next update!