Quality inbound links are extremely important for ranking high in search engines like Google and Yahoo. Link popularity acts as a catalyst to the on-page optimization efforts.  Building good quality backlinks is a time consuming exercise. That is why SEO companies charge a heavy fee to carry out link building tasks for you.

Many website owners make the mistake of buying high pagerank links from irrelevant sites. There are many companies selling linking services that are 100% worthless. Again building links exclusively or mostly from high PageRank sites may flag your site for artificially trying to boost your PageRank.  For long term benefit and security, the sites you select for inbound links should be from an on-topic neighborhood, and have aged domains.  There are four good methods for obtaining quality relevant links.

1. Find websites that may be relevant to your website and approach the webmaster of these sites for a link exchange. There are some link building tools which automate this task by sending spam mails to webmasters. I’d not recommend such tools, but if you really want to use such software, please make sure that your request in email sounds sincere. Link building is a legitimate marketing strategy and therefore it is worth the time to approach the webmasters in an ethical manner.

2. The second link building strategy is also simple yet powerful.  Here you submit articles to free article directories/content sites and to be included in other sites’ ezines. The articles should have a link to your website. These directories will post your articles on their websites and also offer your article to other webmasters for reprinting on their sites and newsletters. You can also submit your website to directories in appropriate categories for getting valuable relevant backlinks.

3. The third strategy has been around for a long time since the internet started. It is to post in forums and news groups. In these forums you can interact with many people building knowledge and also have fun.  The backlinks from such forums are vital since they do not have ‘nofollow’ flag usually found in blog comments. The search engines love forum post links and it is an easy way to get your site spidered on a regular basis.

4. The fourth strategy is competitive intelligence. It involves studying the keywords, links and sites that are sending traffic to your competitor’s website. Competitive intelligence will surely supercharge your link building campaign. Link building using competitive intelligence should be considered an integral part of your ongoing marketing effort.

One easy way to carry out competitive intelligence is by using Google toolbar. In Google toolbar, you will see a link titled ‘Backward Links’. Now, go to a website that is popular in your target market and use the ‘Backwards Links’ toolbar link. Google will display a list of websites that link to the site you are visiting. You can begin your link building campaign at this place.

Many SEO companies will keep their link building techniques a top secret - especially how they use competitive intelligence. SEOMOZ recently published two exhaustive articles on link buidling. I recommend you to have look at them.

1.  Long List of Competitive Link Searches

2.  Competitive intelligence in Link Building

 

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