We’ve established that link building has changed.  It has to be done differently.  We have yet to discuss one of the changes that needs the most attention however.  It is now imperative to track where links come from, and not just for penalty purposes.  Of course if you have tons of links to your page from a ton of totally unrelated pages, you are not doing yourself any favors, but there is more to it than that.

Performance Counts

A major ingredient in link building today is knowing how each link is performing.  Where is all the traffic coming from?  How much money was made from people who clicked on (x) link this month?  Which links resulted in the most link backs?  In the end, you want to know which links increased your bottom line.  Which links had the greatest effect on the bottom line?

How is this Different from Link Building in the Past?

A quick overview is that link building used to be solely for the sake of the search engines.  If they saw lot of links, you would earn higher rankings in search results which would result in more traffic.  Today, you actually want profitable traffic from the links.  Links are no longer only to attract search engines.  Now you need the links that are out there to perform.  Random links on unrelated forums will not do that.  The search engines are not falling for it any more either.  The only reason they cared about links at all was that they seemed to imply others were linking back to your page for relevancy.  Now they know the difference in a link that does that and one that doesn’t.

Look for the Big Dogs

When you purchase advertising from other forms of media, you go for the big dogs, right?  The more people that read that paper, listen to that station, or watch that channel. the better your advertising is going to perform.  The more business it will attract, right?  By the same token, if you sell duck calls you may advertise on some general stations, but the Outdoor Network is going to be a big producer for you.  It is the same reason children’s shows are inundated with toy commercials.  The same is true for links.  You want links to your page from highly viewed sites that are relevant to your business, but you want them there naturally.  If you have to pay for them, to an extent, it doesn’t count.

Throw out the Bait

For the most part, the best thing you can do is just simply focus on doing your job well.  Make your site the best it can be, and let them come to you.  Now and then, throw out a bone in a well thought out, sincere comment or share an exceptional post.   Just make sure you don’t overdo it.  There is a fine line between doing too much and doing nothing at all. Keeping track of what links are performing will help you determine where to focus your link building efforts.  This is essential to being effective and efficient in you link building endeavors.

Missed the first part of Link Building? Click here to see it.