Check out the ClickMinded Link Building Strategy Guide to get started.

Google sees links from external websites as referrals – these websites are essentially vouching for you. The more links you get from high authority, trusted websites, the higher your Domain Authority (your ability to rank for keywords) will be.

The higher the Domain Authority of the website the link is coming from, the more valuable the link is in the eyes of Google.

The links you obtain should also be relevant to your industry. The more links you obtain from websites that are related to your industry or topic of your website, the more likely you will rank for keywords within your industry. Similarly for low authority links, too many external links from irrelevant websites could be seen as spam and could affect your rankings negatively (more in point 29).

Luckily, in life sciences, the easiest place to obtain links are with other trusted high authority life science websites. Here are a few of the best places to get links:

Reach out to your distributors and suppliers for links on their website. This could be in exchange for a link on your site for them.

Reach out to your most loyal customers or clients, or the customers that you have built a relationship with. We found that the most effective way to obtain a link is in exchange for a discount on your products or services.

If any of your clients are university research labs, this is where you could hit the link jackpot. Universities have some of the highest authority websites on the web (usually with a Domain Authority of 85+). One link from a university website will be more impactful to your rankings than 50+ links from low authority web directories.

This can be quick and easy, but it is a risky way of building links. Google frowns upon building links in this unnatural way as they see it as an attempt to manipulate their algorithms. Building links in too many web directories can result in a Google penalty. We recommend building links in 5 (maximum 10) trusted web directories related to life sciences. Just a few of these include http://biopharmguy.com/, http://www.biospace.com/ and http://www.dmoz.com/.

Create excellent content and resources for the life science industry that are valuable enough to link to. A great way to get inspiration for content and resources is to conduct a competitor link analysis. Using Open Site Explorer (free with a Moz subscription), filter through the link profile of a competitor that is successfully ranking online.

Open Site Explorer is a fantastic resource that gives you information about every inbound link that a website has. You can essentially spy on your competitors. The software tells you where the link is coming from, which page it’s linking to, the anchor text, and even the spam score and domain authority of the linking website.

Within the links displayed, we’re looking for common resources and content that external websites are linking to again and again.

As mentioned in point 28, if link building is not done correctly, Google could view your link profile as spammy and potentially impose a Google penalty on your site.

Even before you embark on a link building campaign, it is important to check the health of your link profile using Open Site Explorer to check for spammy and low authority links that could be impacting your site negatively.

Also check any overuse of anchor text in your inbound links which could be considered a red flag of unnatural link building by Google. As a general rule, if 10+% of your inbound links have exact match anchor text (not including branded anchor text), then you should consider diluting this.

Performing a link audit is especially important if you have paid for any previous SEO services. Outdated SEO methods included submitting your site to 100s, even 1000s of spammy web directories. Google caught on to this technique and now imposes Google penalties on any websites it finds participating in these unnatural link building campaigns.

Authorship markup search snippet images are gone, but you may still want to add it to your site. Use the Authorship Markup Walkthrough.