Important On-page Factors To Judge When Building Links

Here are seven on-page factors to judge when building links.

1. Types and Quality of Content

Building links can be hard when you have great content. When you have subpar content? It can be a nightmare, unless you're willing to use riskier strategy.

One big problem that I see with the general blanket advice of "create great content" is that there isn't always a essential emphasis on creating the right kind of content. Not all site needs a blog.

Think about what your users want to see, what they need, what they'd find useful and helpful, and see if you can make it in such a way that people outside of your target audience could also advantage..

Good writing is also very important. If there's one thing that makes me instantly distrust or discount a site, it's poor writing.

2. Titles

Misleading titles waste people's time.

Think about how you'd sense if you were running Google AdWords and the person who had written your ads had used a title that caused loads of people to click then instantly leave the site because they were misled. There's absolutely a chance that you might come up with a great title that you think completely represents your content but no one else agrees.

3. Images
 

For my monthly columns, we're required to use images, and rightly so as there's a lot of information out there about the increased user engagement on content that is or contains at least one chart.
Images by themselves can be fantastic for link building purposes, but if it's true that having a post with an image on it can up the chances of attracting more eyes on your content, that noticeably increases your chances of getting links.

4. Video and Interactive Content 

Above all else, make sure that your video or interactive content really works! I seem to have a bad habit of landing on posts that contain videos that don't load. If you're pulling something like this from another site, make sure it's dependable.

5. Internal Links and Search ability
 

Think of this from a user's perspective. If you land on the homepage of a site that you found in the SERPs or saw socialized on Twitter, it may not hold the information that you're looking for and hoping to potentially link to. If it's difficult to move around on the site and find what you need, you'll get frustrated.

Don't make things hard for people. If you have a Services page but have a page for each of those services that goes more in-depth, then link to it! It sounds clear, but I've seen enough pages where basics like this weren't done that I don't think anything can really be too obvious a concept.
 

6. Outbound Links

When you link out, do so to trusted and applicable sites. Think of it in the same way that you would think about a site linking to you. You want those links to be good ones, so link out well.
I've thought less of several articles when I saw who they referenced. If someone writes an article that is widely criticized, one where the comments are full of authority figures pointing out the inaccuracies, then I will think less of a post that links to that article in order to highlight it as a reputable one. You are who you associate with, remember.

7. Shareability and User Engagement

Remember how we had planning online before Twitter? We commented on posts.
Many times discussions seem to take place on social media and not in blog comments, so I wouldn't discount content that has no comments, but if a post has 150 spam comments on it, I would think twice before linking to it. If I come diagonally a post from someone I've never heard of and see people that I know commenting on it or sharing it online, I'm much more likely to spend the time to read it myself.
 

Conclusion

Make your content something that we want to link to, something that's simply shared on Twitter or Facebook or wherever you want it to be shared. Make your site easily searchable and make sure everything works and looks good, too, and check it on mobile devices. It's fairly simple.
With the nonstop information being published online, people have to pick and prefer what they read, share, and link to, so don't think that on-page factors don't come into play where links are worried. They can make or break your link building in many cases.

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