In order to dominate a niche market your website needs to have a backlink portfolio that has these three traits: highly targeted, high quality links – placed in the right spot on the page – with the right anchor text.

Of course, in the process of building backlinks with the characteristics highlighted above, you’ll be presented with numerous alternatives for making your work a lot easier… but not necessarily constructive and profitable. In this post you’ll find out exactly what not to do.

Backlinking practices you must avoid

1. Don’t outsource your link building project unless you verify those you outsource to and they are qualified and aligned with your methods.

2. Don’t search for “keyword phrase” and “submit site” in Google. The vast majority of results are garbage sites.

3. Avoid three-way linking schemes. Search engines are getting better at detecting and discounting these links. Google in particular has aggressively begun to target and discount three way links.

4. Don’t just get links to your home page, get deep links to any page you want to rank well in Google; the ration should be 30~40% of links going to home page and 60~70% being deep links.

5. Don’t use link building software or send mass emails for links.

6. Don’t hire services which “guarantee” links or allow links added through automation. These kind of services are most likely intricate link farm consisting of a network of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.

7. Don’t automate link submission on your webpages; manually approve all link requests.

8. Don’t approve a link request until you ensure the site has not “faked” their PageRank. Also, verify the page has a current cache date in Google.

9. Don’t burst the link volume on short periods of time. You want to make sure the number of links matches the amount of traffic you are receiving. Until your site is getting 500 unique visitors per day, I would stick to 5-10 acquired links per day max. In other words, avoid disparities between the number of backlinks to your website and the amount of traffic you’re receiving.

10. Don’t make backlinking decisions based on PageRank. Instead, build backlinks to provide complete solutions to your visitor’s needs.

11. Don’t go after generic keywords which are on the wrong end of the buying cycle.

12. Don’t search link partners amoung websites that are competiting for the first 100 keywords in your niche market. the chances of getting a link from them are very slim because they are your direct competitors. descent to the next 300-500 keywords.

13. Don’t link to the home page of the directory you have submitted to; instead, link to the page where your listing appears.

14. Don’t create so-called a “links page” where you build a page and stuff a bunch of links to “recommended resources”, “links” or “get more information”.

Assimilate this Backlinks Prohibition Bill and you’re well on your way to conduct a successful Off-Page optimization campaign.

Be confident and enrich this checklist with your own experiences.