If life has us pegged at death and taxes, then it’s important for Internet marketers like us to know about two of the most important absolutes in SEO as well: keywords and links. People who want their sites to rank well on the SERPs would do well to take note of these two important SEO elements and how best to take advantage of them.
Keyword research and link building go hand in hand with one another. For instance, if you know you can’t do well in getting that exact keyword for your business, then you can always switch your SEO efforts on link building instead. This is why it’s important to build a solid list of quality links that point back to your site. But how exactly do you go about doing this?
Rob Chant at Search Engine Watch shares with us some useful link building tips on how to set your goals and define your competition. He explains that the ultimate goal of link building is to build “lots of links” pointing back to your site. The first step to do this is to create a well-defined target on the figures that you want when it comes to building up your links. He explains it here by saying:
As with any business process, before you even start it’s a good idea to have a target in mind (and on paper!). Even if you are your own boss, realistic, short-term targets, to go alongside your bigger goals, really help to sharpen what you’re doing. But as you can’t just pull a target out of the air, how do you set about creating something real for your link building?
Clearly, when it comes to links, one site’s “lots” will be another’s “hardly any”. It all depends on the niche and how competitive it is. But luckily for us, we can come up with realistic figures for our own sites very easily.
To check with these figures, Chant suggested using several tools which can help you with measuring incoming links from a given site. Tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO can easily track the links going back to any site and use this information to build up your link list. In fact, you can even use these tools to spy on the back links that your competitors use.
So why is it important to check out your competitor’s links? Chant explains it quite well by saying:
Analyzing your competitors’ links is a hugely powerful area of SEO, but right now, we just want to focus on two things — the raw numbers of links and linking domains that each of your competitors has. These are the figures that will let you set decent targets for yourself.
However, before you can start, you need to work out who your competitors are in the first place. It’s important to differentiate search competitors from your “real world” competitors in this case (although they might be one and the same). We’re simply looking at the sites that are already ranking for the keywords you’re targeting.
He goes on to explain that because these sites are occupying the spot that you want, you have to focus on finding and edge over these competitors. However, try not to bite off more than you can chew if you know you’re going up against the likes of Wikipedia or Amazon. If this is the case, then I think you’re better off changing your angle of attack and perhaps reevaluate the keywords you want to compete for.
Once you’ve narrowed down your list of competitors, then it’s time to use those web tools we discussed earlier and find out what links and domains your rivals are juicing into their own respective sites. You now have a clear target to hit once you’ve identified which ones among your competitors have the highest amount of domains linking back to them.
Chant ends his article with a bit of a caveat. He cautions all would be link hunters not to be overly ambitious with your goals however. Your biggest competitor will most likely have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of links pointing back to their site. This shouldn’t discourage you in any way though. In this case, try to aim for a more realistic target and look at your competitor who holds the 5th, 10th or even 20th spot. Once you’ve dominated those lower spots, you can then aim higher and look to improve your ranking even more.
Also, the quality of the links that you’re aiming for counts just as much as the quantity. Even for sites who don’t have as many links as their competitor, if most of the links pointing back to them come from reliable authority sites, then they’re sure to score highly for relevance as compared to a site that has more numerous low quality back links.
Well, those are all the tips on link building that we have at the moment. If you have any suggestions on some cool link building tactics, feel free to leave a comment below. I hope everything works out for you guys and happy link hunting!
Later,
Andy
