Link building is one of the most important SEO techniques. Since the web is getting so competitive, it is important to not only have a high quantity of links, but quality links as well. This is especially true for highly popular and competitive “money” key phrases. The fast and easy links such as social media and directory links help, but to rank well in competitive searches, you’ll need some good inbound links from relevant, high page rank authoritive sites.

How do you find which sites are good?

Great question! If you’re asking this you’re already heading in the right path to crush your competition online. Speaking of competition, do you know of any competing sites that already rank well for your desired keywords? I’m willing to bet most of you answered yes to that question. If you don’t know of any off hand, just do a quick Google search for your desired phrase and jot down the urls of the 10 websites on the first page.

So, what better place to start than doing a little poking around your competitor’s website? They are ranking well. Why?

What do I look for?

You can and should take a close look at their title tags and content, but I’ll cover that in another article. Today we are focusing on links, so let’s check out their inbound links.

There are a few ways to do this, I’ll cover two. There are two really handy tools to save you a lot of time researching the inbound links of successful sites. One is Yahoo! Site Explorer. This useful tool enables you to put in a url to explore. Enter your url in the field at the top and hit “Explore URL.” Next, you’ll see the result details. What you are concerned with is the second button, “Inlinks.” This tells you two things right off the bat. One, how many inbound links the site has. Two, who is linking to this site. This is VALUABLE information!

Another tool that does this same task, but takes much of the grunt work out is Web CEO (affiliate link). This powerful tool will pretty much automate this whole process. It will walk you through finding who your successful competitors are, how many links they have and who. It also features some robust features that enable you to compare your site to others in terms of links and anchor text. It will help streamline the process of finding good link partners and even features an admin system to help you send and track link proposals to other websites.

Now what?

So now you have some powerful information in front of you. The next step is to put in the grunt work and contact these websites that link to your competitors and see if you can convince them to link to yours. Some will be easy (blogs, directories etc.), others will not. For the tough ones you’ll have to view it as “what is in it for them.” Meaning, why would they want to link to your website? Ask and answer this question for each site you approach. DO NOT take a cookie cutter approach with one standard template email letter. This will get you ignored by most sites and will be a total waste of your time. Analyze each site, research each site and be genuine and sincere when you contact them. Be sure to include some of the information you picked up when analyzing their site. Remember, it is their website and they don’t have to link to you. Also remember that this is a numbers game. The more effort you put into it, the more you get out of it.

Completing this type of link building approach on a regular basis, grabbing a link here and there through time will work wonders for the traffic that flows to your website. Each link opens a door to new potential visitors and greases the wheel for your site to slide up in the search engines rankings, sending more relevant, natural traffic to your site.

(image credit – Amanda)

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1. 10 Great Link Building Techniques
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