Link building can help boost your site’s visibility via other sites and search results. Create audience focused linkable assets – that will ensue that your website offers value to your visitors. What decides whether your links are good? The quality of your content is the answer. The more valuable your content is – the more valuable your links will be for your readers. Sites cannot link by themselves – people who read content link to your webpage. If your page reaches out to other low value content, your page rank is also impacted.

In order to identify relevant, valued and trusted sites for links here are some of the criteria to follow:

Relevance: Your link should be relevant with respect to both the context of the page it appears as well as the people who actually read that page.

Value for users: The ultimate aim is value for users. The page you are trying to link to should provide value for their users – only then will that page be of any value to you. User expectations have already been set for what to expect from that site. So, when they click on your link and land on your site, your content should be valuable for them as well.

Trust and authority: You also need to check the backlinks for that page. If they are linking to a lot of spam links, stir clear! Check their content. IF that is not living up to your reader’s expectations – flee! Check out and pay attention to all the possible red flags.

Tools and metrics: In order to gauge the authority of the site, you can use Ahref’s Domain Rating or Moz’s Domain Authority or Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow. It’s ok not to get too hung up on domain authority. Just get an idea about the links you are trying to reach out to and you will get a fair idea of how to build your link portfolio.

Thoroughly inspect each site that you want a link back from and check whether the site is good for your users – even without Google in the picture. If you wouldn’t have to impress Google, would you still link to this site – for the sake of your audience?