Top Link Building Checklist to Streamline Your Backlink Efforts.

Building backlinks is not a piece of cake. It requires you to juggle dozens of tasks at once. From finding link building opportunities to evaluating websites to outreaching webmasters to crafting content. And each of these steps includes at least five subtasks.

Without a proper link-building checklist, there’s no way to keep track of everything unless you want to diminish your link building efforts.

To prevent this, we’ve pulled together our 6-year knowledge of getting backlinks and created a link building cheat sheet.

Let’s streamline your backlink efforts right away!

Link Building Basics Every SEO Pro Must Know

Before we break down our checklist, let’s dig down to the basics and review essential link building terms. We want this content to be as helpful for beginners as SEO pros. If you already know all the definitions listed, feel free to jump to the next chapter.

• Link equity (AKA link juice): Both terms stand for the link value that backlinks pass to the site they link to. If you build links from quality sites, you will see your domain authority grow thanks to the link equity it gets. You can think of link equity as a search ranking factor (it actually is) because your site’s rankings depend on the number of high-quality links it gets from relevant sites (among other factors). The link juice might be significantly increased if a page has a solid number of quality links or/and is interlinked properly with the rest of the other pages on a site.
• Do-follow and no-follow links: No-follow links don’t pass any link equity (or reportedly, do so on rare occasions) to the destination page. By applying the HTML attribute rel="nofollow» to a backlink, you tell Google’s search engine not to share its link juice. In contrast, do-follow links transfer authority (link equity) to the destination page. However, the rel="dofollow» attribute doesn’t exist. All backlinks are passing link juice by default unless otherwise specified.
• Backlink anchor text is the text a link is connected to. The visible part, often blue and underlined, you click on to get to another page. Anchor text helps Googlebot determine the most relevant keywords the destination page should rank for.
• Link schemes: There are many different techniques used to manipulate backlinks to boost a website’s ranking that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Exchanging money for links, creating PBNs, and excessive link exchange are among them.

Now that you’re armed with the necessary SEO vocabulary and are close to calling yourself an SEO Guru, let’s jump straight to the link building checklist.

Our Free Downloadable Link Building Checklist

This checklist is a byproduct of our daily link building process at Digital Olympus when working on customers' projects. No matter if you’re starting from scratch or streamlining your current link building strategy, this will help.

We boiled all intermediate steps down to create three main sections so you can easily apply each to your company.

Let’s see what’s inside.