Without a strong SEO presence, virtually no website can hope to attract a large amount of traffic and attention organically. While there are a handful of alternatives – such as organic social media outreach – search engines remain the most viable medium through which brands can cultivate a sizable and consistent flow of traffic.

While there are many elements that incorporate into a full-fledged SEO strategy, building links offers one of the most robust set of benefits. Besides being good for SEO itself, link building can also help generate organic traffic from other websites to select pages on your own.

But which links are worth building and which ones should be passed up? Not every website makes for a good option. To help answer this, we’ll review some tips on how to decide which links are worth the effort.

Investigate Website Quality

First and foremost, making sure you are spending the optimal amount of time focused on cultivating links from the right places will ensure your link building efforts go the distance. There are a seemingly countless number of websites from which pinging URLs back to your own website is a possibility, but many of these websites lack the true quality, trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines, and valuable traffic that make it worthwhile.

Specifically when it comes to quality, there are a plethora of tools available – many of them for free – that can you help you determine how much clout a website has in terms of how search engines perceive it. Focusing on metrics such as page and domain authority will ensure you don’t inadvertently build links on websites that could potentially waste your time or even harm your website via association.

Determine Website Relevance

In theory, earning a bunch of high-profile backlinks from prominent websites seems like a good thing. Not too long ago, this would’ve been the case – regardless of relevance. However, search engines are increasingly looking at links to and from websites while assessing the relevance or topical nature of the connection.

Besides these SEO considerations, it’s also worth mentioning that relevance will impact how much referral traffic you can generate in the process. Earning links isn’t just about trying to convince search engines that your website is worth it: it’s also about driving traffic from these websites to your page(s). As such, ensuring there is a viable connection between the websites you’re aiming to earn backlinks from and your own is a worthwhile consideration.

Evaluate Cumulative Effort

Last but not least, consider just how much energy you’ll need to expend in order to earn one or more backlinks from a particular website or brand. While your website hopefully will be earning backlinks passively in the meantime, focusing on cultivating specific link building opportunities means using your time wisely.

If one or more websites that could start pinging URLs back to your own require substantially greater effort than other, comparably valuable alternatives, then it may prove beneficial to set the former aside until you have exhausted other, more efficient opportunities.

Without a set of criteria to consider, building backlinks proactively can be a very inefficient process. By evaluating how much effort relative to benefit each opportunity presents, how relevant a website is to your own brand and determining the overall quality of the website(s) in question, you can figure out which options are the best to focus on first and foremost.