How to Evaluate Link Opportunities via @jeremyknauff
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How to Evaluate Link Opportunities
It can sometimes be difficult to tell how much effort is reasonable, or if it's even worthwhile to pursue a link from a particular website. Especially if you're relatively new to SEO.
I was recently reminded of this while training an employee to find potential link opportunities. She's great at the job she does day in and day out, but she completely missed the mark on this.
Part of the reason she missed the mark was because I initially gave very loose guidelines. I like to do that because it helps me see how my employees think on a topic and it shows me what I don't need to teach them. It also helps them to become more comfortable taking initiative.
The other part of the reason she missed the mark is that there is no purely objective way to evaluate a website. It requires the instinct of an experienced professional.
Sure, we have some metrics like Domain Authority or traffic volume, but search engine optimization is just as much an art as it is a science, so it's impossible to break things like this down to purely a mathematical formula.
That's why evaluating potential link opportunities requires us to make a judgment based on a number of factors, using both data and instinct.
I'm going to outline my process in this article.
1. Domain Metrics
When we're trying to earn a link from a website, our main goal is to improve organic ranking.
Sure, we all talk about publicity, brand recognition, referral traffic, and these are all worthy goals, but the bottom line is that we want to rank better so we'll get more organic traffic.
One of the easiest ways to prioritize the websites we want to earn links from is to sort them by an objective measurement of the strength of the domain.
We used to be able to do that with Google's PageRank, but those d