What is the definition of the perfect link? Aside from search engine algorithms or the engineers that program them having the “absolute answer” to this quandary, here are our top 10 factors for SEO to look for in building or receiving the perfect link.

A large part of relevance and rankings are determined by the number of quality inbound links that are referring to your website.

Here’s our vote for the top 10 things to look for in a link.

1. that it occurs naturally, or at least appears that way.
2. that it is one way (non reciprocal).
3. that it uses the main keyword(s) for the page it links to.
4. that it is from a site that is related and not off-topic.
5. that it comes from a website with high search or high traffic volume.
6. that it passes link juice and does not use a no-follow tag.
7. that the original site is receiving fresh links and not over-linking.
8. that the number of outbound links on the page is under 50 links.
9. that the originating site is indexed in all major search engines.
10. that you cap the number of inbound links from a site to 10 to preserve IP diversity.

Aside from those top 10 link factors, you should have nothing to worry about. Naturally not all links are perfect, but in a nutshell they either (a) pass ranking power a.k.a link juice or (b) they do not. The trick is, to keep the supply steady and not to gain or lose too many links too fast. So, having links with a high churn rate will only result in record breaking highs and nearly depressing lows for your websites overall stability as it fluctuates in the search engine result pages as a result of monkeying around with your websites natural link weight ratio and link velocity/ the time it takes to gain or lose links.

Are you linking to your links?

Chances are, if you experience a dip in rankings it’s time to either see if their is a bad neighborhood you may have inter mingled with, or some of your links stopped passing juice.

In the first case, you can use this tool to find out who to oust from your domain, on the latter, just go back through your sites links using a command like link:www.yourwebsitename.com using yahoo (don’t forget the colon) sift through them all and revitalize them by using social bookmarks to give them a nice PR7 or 8 boost.

This is in essence similar to a deep linking strategy when you link to pages other than your home page to bring spiders and revived verve to the page. Whereas in this case, you are performing the same link rescue mission on the sites that gave you a boost, using other sites such as suggested above.

Related posts:

1. Link Love Link Juice and Link Building use Protection or you May get Banned
2. Balancing Link Diversity, Link Velocity and Link Volume!
3. Managing Link Weight and Building Link Insurance!
4. Link Building – Achieving Stable Rankings through Link Velocity
5. Building Link Popularity for Your Website One Link At a Time!