Have you heard this expression, “Link building is the most difficult part of SEO!”? We’ve heard this so many times and we even believed it a while ago. But Link Building doesn’t have to be hard. Reinventing the wheel is just a loss of time and resources but improving it a bit with some new spokes will make it run faster.
I am pretty sure you are just waiting for the magic recipe but there is no magic in here; it is just hard work and good methods. Below, I’m going to share with you a method which I am using successfully for many years.
Analyze your competitors’ backlinks
Think of link building as any other business strategy. The question is how can you find a working business strategy? Now, here comes the method – Study over your (fortunate) competitors! I feel like you’ve already got the idea – look where your competitors have created inbound links and try to get on those websites’ links pointing back to your website. Got it?
If your competitors have got this advantage of ranking higher in Google search they have got some really good inbound links as PR and the position in SERP are very dependable on those off site SEO factors like inbound links.
How to find out which websites are linking to your competitors?
If you’re an SEO professional reading this article, you might already know it. If you’re not, then pay attention to the following.
To find out who’s linking to your competitor’s website, type in Google:
link:www.yourcompetitorwebsite.com
Of course .com is replaceable with .net, .org, .us, etc.
The results will show you who’s hosting a link to your competitor. The number of those links will also give you a clue on the power of your competitors – many websites = strong Google authority, good Google PageRank and a good position in SERP. Hey, but this is what you want, isn’t it? Cool, so we are going to produce some results here.
The next step is to go and ask those websites if they can give you a link in their blogroll or if there is just a simple website and not a blog, if they can offer you an advertising space. Don’t accept a link on pages built for links – resources pages are just useless – they probably have already tons of links on those pages. Ask for a link on a page with less external links. Those pages with many external links generally have a bad reputation and will not pass you much authority or PR juice. The best place for a link is into the copy of the website – E.g. blog article. Also remember, link building based on reciprocal links is not really a good method.
Soliciting backlinks
Here is an example of a short but straight, to the point email you can send to those website owners when asking for a link:
Dear X,
We just found your website, which is very interesting and because we are talking about the same subjects on our website, we will be more than happy if you can include our website into your blog roll.
Also we have a great deal of writing useful advices so if possible we can help you with some guest writing.
Our website/blog is www.mywebsite.com
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Your Name
Guest posting
From within all of those possible methods of getting a backlink, I recommend guest writing as it is a very useful method of catching new inbound links. It’s free and you will get a do-follow link to your website. Also if your writing is excellent you’ll get for sure a lot of traffic. And there is another thing – the site-wide links (blog roll links) aren’t that good or can sometimes even hurt your rank but a link back placed into the body text of a website will give you only benefits.
Interesting article.. Thanks for all the tips. Look forward to use some of those and get better backlinks.
Your article sounds interesting and informative post. Thanks for sharing it.
Don’t you think, Reciprocal links from higher PR are good? This are considered to be quality links. What are your thoughts on this?
Thank you.
Regards,
Chintan
@Chintan
Reciprocal link will never give you SEO advantages. Yes, it will help users find relevant information outside you website but will never give you rank or Page Rank.
Still as Google wants / likes websites to act natural is a good practice to do some link exchange and even better to have some links to authority websites in your niche. I have right now one single website I recommend, SeoMOZ which I really love and I found useful.
Having those links to external resources, beside helping your users, will help you to emulate a “real world” environment so your website will be more search engines’ spiders’ catchy.
Nice post. Enjoyed reading it every body make a link directory . Have lot of ready made script is also available.
What good tips these are . I will follow your advice and ask ppl to blogroll me in exchange for guest posts:)
I think the backlink building process is more productive when you have a plan of attack that is more likely to generate results.
As you describe above, knowing who is linking to the sites you have to beat is key information to what you need to be focusing on.
Then its scheduling the time to take the actions required in a systematic basis so its like anything else you have to do on a daily or weekly basis.
You really seem to make things sound easier, many on the run have not yet realized that it is such an easy task if only they be updated of the tips above, so educative and helpful.
Even with the evil panda out there, Linkbuilding is still one of the main fixtures of good SEO practice.