Link Building - Tips, Tools and Techniques

Link building should be an integral part of your Search Engine Optimization campaign. Link building begins as soon as you have a website that people will want to link to. In fact while you are planning your web-site, you may want to check out the competition too. This gives you an idea of what kind of effort is going to be needed on your part to beat them to the top of the Search Engine Rankings.

What is link building and why is it important?

Google and other Search Engines consider the PageRank of your page to determine the position of your page on the Search Engine Results. The number of links pointing towards your page is calculated by Google and other Search Engines to determine your PageRank (PR).

Now links don't point towards your webpage automatically. There is quite a bit of work involved in getting people to point to you. First of all there should be good content. Then you need to make people aware of your content. Then you need to ask them (nicely) to link to you.

Ok, so far so good. Now the question is : who is the best person to ask for a link? Can I ask my neighbor who has his own website? Can I ask my mom? Can I ask someone I met at a blog?

Ok, ok. I am getting there! You can ask anyone for a link. In fact you should ask everyone you know for a link. Although, for a PageRank calculation, the only links that matter much are those originating from pages that themselves have a high PageRank. Ok, So, if I get links from a high PR page, I get high PR? - Yup that's about it.

The Link Building Technique:

How do you find such pages to request links from?

You could do it the hard way or the easy way.

First, the hard way:

1. Bring up the Google Search page and enter your keywords. See what pages come up.
2. Then copy each webpage link that comes up into a MS Excel file for later use. We need at least 30 to 50 names. Let's name this file Competition.xls. These are the webpages that you are competing against.
3. Go back to Google; click on the first link to browse to that website. Study the page to find the reasons what that page is doing right. After all it came up #1 for your selected keywords. Study the title, the content, the links etc. Study the meta tags.
4. Then open Google again. Copy the first link from your Competition.xls file (lets call it contender1) and paste into the Search text box. Click the Search button.
5. The webpages that now show up all have links to Contender1. These are called BackLinks of Contender1. Copy each of these links on to another Excel File. Lets call this BackLinks.xls.
6. Click the first link in the results page. We shall call this page BackLinker1.
7. Find the link or links that's pointing towards Contender1. Study the anchor text, the href text and again the meta tags of this page.
8. Repeat this for at least 20 backlinkers. These are the people you will likely contact later to request a link to your webpage.
9. Go back to Google and repeat the whole process (Steps 1 thru 8) for Contenders 2 through 50.

Then, go to Yahoo and start from the beginning.

Then, go to Bing and ... well, you get the picture.

Now that you have a good idea of who the possible backlinkers are, its time to start fixing up your site to make it attractive for them. Then, its just a matter of contacting the webmasters and requesting them to link to your webpage.

Easy, huh? - No, not quite!

The Link Building TIP:

Link building is an ongoing process. You are never done with it. So, the sooner you get used to doing this on a regular basis, the faster your business will grow.

Now, here is the lazy man's way to link building.

TIP: Invest in a Search Linking Tool. The hard way can easily set you back by days if not weeks of effort. If I can pay my way out of it, I will; and you should too.

A good link building tool will let you, in the very minimum

1. Analyze Backlinks using a specified search engine.
2. Analyze link anchor text, title, link text
3. Verify that link partners you work with are still linking back to you.
4. Find where your site is ranked for a given keyword.
5. Find the pages that are indexed on your site. 
6. Find authority web sites using your keywords.
7. Find Alexa Ranking for various web sites.
8. Have ability to save your work and resume at a later time.

 A good tool should also:

• Be easy to use. You need to be able to use it very intuitively.
• Have good customer service support in case you have a problem.
• Provide regular updates to your software in case something changes in the Search industry. Google changes its algorithm quite frequently. You don't want it to make your software unusable.
• A strong money-back guarantee in case you are dis-satisfied.

And finally,

 The Link Building TOOLS

I actually use two tools for link building; depending on which client I am working with.