How to Determine The Quality of Site

If you are into SEO to improve your SERP rankings and drive targeted traffic to your site then you are most likely into the topic of “getting quality links”. Of course, unless your name is Rae Hoffman and have several years of marketing experience in your back to find ways how to get those links come to you naturally (or rather, how to perform that link-bait strategy that everyone speaks about). By the way, the article to which I am linking on Rae Hoffman’s (Suggarrae) blog is a one hell of a good read and inspiration on how to build a branding site from “scratch”.

Perhaps the title of this article should have been “How to determine the quality of sites from which we want links” but heck that would be a really long title, but you got the point.

Sooner or later you WILL realize that your site does need some sort of promotion, would that be promotion to improve your search engine rankings for your keywords, would it be a promotion of a product or service you offer it doesn’t matter, what matters is that you do need to promote your site, not once, but constantly..especially at the first years of your site that will require some heavy promotions to get the word out and let people know that your site DOES EXIST.

Every single link to your site is welcome

True, every single link pointing to your site (or a inner page of your site) is a good thing, it shows that your site can be a good reference, a good place where someone can solve its problems, but what happens when you do need those links but you are not getting them in the natural way as Rae Hoffman does, and you are forced to go out there (yeah, Google) and look for links for your website, where you actually will be investing your time (if not, even your money) for those links, will then still the old say “Every single link to your site is welcome” be valid? To simply answer, NO. And here are two reasons why:

1. Your business doesn’t have time to waste
2. Your competitor won’t wait for you to learn the lesson

You have a business because you want to sell products/services so you can earn money, and every wasted hour is a – for your bank account. While you wasting time on low quality (aka low authority) sites related to your products/services your competitors is already looking at strong and authoritative sites to promote his website/product (gosh, I hate slashing like that, I will just try to concentrate and use one single name to define your business) and after an hour of research you will achieve to get 10-20-100 of low quality links, while your competitor has invested the same time and has got 1-2-3 high authority (high quality) links to his site. At the end of the day, you see him outranking you and you keep wondering why. And the answer is simple, the sites that ‘reference’ your competitors product have a greater authority over your 100 gibberish sites.

Imagine it this way

I want to buy a computer, but I don’t know which one would be good for me. What I need is a computer with good performances but nothing extreme, that will last long and won’t cost much. I decide it is time to ask for others opinion to clear up my ideas and figure out what I need.

Then I find 100 regular people that don’t work as tech support or have deep knowledge of computers (aka, zero references) and one of them is a posh girl that does her nails all day long (why a posh? because I want so, its my story). All of them would recommend me to buy a Sony Vaio (and their answers would be,

• it is a good computer i recently bought it and had no problems
• oh its much better then the previous old computer I have, now I don’t wait 10 mins to load a page
• oh my sony vaio is pink, its so sexy, just like me. (I know you got it, this was the posh girl)

While walking to the store to buy me a sony vaio because it: has no problems while its new, won’t make me load a page for 10 minutes and it is sexy, I end up seeing an old friend of mine which happens to be a computer geek, works in a big company that offers tech support and knows what a computer has better then what is in his sandwich (no offense guys, it is a compliment) and previously many of my friends had told me he has fixed their computer so I should better ask him (what a coincidence). I tell him what my intentions are and his answer is: dude, sony vaio costs over 1k with only 2gb of memory ram, 250Gb of hard disk and a 2.0 GHz processor speed, with that money or less you can get a nice HP Pavillion with at least 4GB of ram, 600GB of memory with a 2.6 GHz processor and the quality of their hardware is much better then a sony vaio.

(Note: This is just an example, I am not saying that sony vaio sucks and that HP is much better (which could be, or be the opposite scenario). My knowledge over computer performances can be a paragon with Mother Theresa and bodybuilding scenario, kinda..

Which product do you think I will end up buying after I got 100s of references for sony vaio by people that don’t know the subject and have not been referenced to my by nobody or that one reference I received for HP Pavillion by a person who has been referenced to me by several other people that he knows the subject well? I don’t know about you, but after the reference from a tech support guy for who many of my friends told me I should ask, you still want to buy a pink sony vaio over a well configured HP Pavillion for the same price it is up to you, but let me tell you, in that case you got issues, and if search engines would act that way they would have been out of business for a long time now.

To put it simple and cut off this long article (which kinda slipped out of topic with that story) when you look for a site, which you would want to refer your website/product/service you want that site to:

• Be referred by others (aka: have good amount of inbound links)
• Be a point of reference (aka: authoritative on the subject)
• Has been for awhile now in the market (aka: is established site)

If a site has the above 3 qualities I mentioned then your benefits would be: Better rankings since you get a reference from an established authoritative site on the subject. Have new visitors to your site since old established sites have a good amount of visitors already which will then lead to sales and income on your end.

If you are using FireFox browser you might consider installing Aaron Wall’s SEO Toolbar addon which will give you all the needed information’s regarding the quality of a site.

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