1) Website Relevance: When prospecting for potential link-building opportunities, the first thing to look at is the theme or niche of the website. If the site covers topics that are completely different to yours, chances are that readers (and Google) will find the link to be irrelevant and unnatural. 2) Determine the Site’s Organic Traffic & Keyword Visibility: A site should have decent organic traffic and keyword visibility themselves. Ideally, you will want to get your anchor text posted on a website with high organic traffic so that you will receive a lot of visibility in return. A minimum of 500 traffic is a must. The more visitors a site has and the more keywords it ranks for, the higher the chance that those visitors will land on your website via the backlink. 3) Number & Velocity of Referring Domains Next, you’ll want to check the number, type and velocity of referring domains that the website gets. Here are some things to look out for: a. Has the site gained/received a significant number of backlinks in a short period of time? b. Has the site gained a lot of backlinks from just a few publishers? c. Has the site gained a lot of backlinks from Web 2.0 sites i.e. blogspot.com. Examine the target site and see that the amount of backlinks has been steadily growing naturally. 4) Some no-follow links: A website must have some no-follow links. It’s important to have nofollow links as they indicate that the site has been growing at its own pace, gaining links naturally. Also, you should build some no-follow links from quora, medium, reddit, etc. 5) Anchor Text & Link Placement Think about the anchor text (the clickable element of the link within the linking page) and placement of the backlink on the site you’re analysing. The two questions you want to ask yourself are: a. Does the anchor text and link make sense in the context of the rest of the content on the page? b. Where has the link been placed within the page? The anchor text used to link your website should be placed naturally within the content. If the anchor looks unnatural i.e. it is obvious that it’s been added for link building purposes, Google will pick up on it as it uses the surrounding text of the anchor to determine relevance. Also, backlinks should be placed towards the beginning of the page as very few visitors are likely to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.