Link building is a tough job. It’s not only hard work, but there are so many pitfalls on the way to achieve the “perfect” link. Therefore we’ll share our very own 7 Golden Link Building Strategies with you!

1. Google is always right

If Google thinks a page is relevant for a keyword, it really is – so get a link there!

If you want to build relevant links to your website you simple need to ask Google for the most relevant pages, but research your key phrases. So the first step is to type your keywords into Google. Certainly you will get many results and digging through all of them could REALLY take a while. As you can see in the picture above, the query “my keyword”  gathers 271,000,000 results. While that’s an artifical example, there are other keyword phrases that have similar strong competition and/or saturation in the SERPs. More typical phrases like “credit cards” still have over a million results, “cheap flights” come in “cheap” with only 25 million results

The most important thing to keep in mind is, that if Google thinks that one page is relevant for your keyphrase, then there is no doubt that this website will definitely be relevant for you. So get a link there!

2. Look at your Competitor’s Links

Analyzing your competition can save you a lot of time.

The competitors rank above you because of their links. That’s why it is important to take a closer look at these links. It is always good to know which websites link to your competitors and which anchor texts they are using, because you can use these websites as another possible link source. You should keep in mind that competitors are not only other companies, but also could be governments, industry hubs, news and so on.
One thing you can gather are learning’s about its context parameters. These backlinks reveal data as Yahoo Backlinks, Google Backlinks, Google PageRank, Domain Creation Date, Google Cache, Alexa, Sistrix, Whois and many more. Evaluate the backlinks of your competitors and try to analyze their patterns. Judge the quality and strength of them and then just go after them.

3. Compare Backlinks of your Competitors

Explore links across an industry and snatch the common, most essential backlinks from your competition.

If you want to rank in the top ten it is inevitable to find similarities between you and the companies already ranking for your keyphrase. Every single common backlink is definitely a link that you should try to get to your own website. In the picture above you can see that A and F are common backlinks for the competitors 1,2 and 3. Therefore you must try to get a backlink from A or F. In the best case you get a backlink from both of them. In principle this is the concept of good neighborhood. If a web page links to a top ranking website, you will also be seen in the top ranks if you have a backlink from this web page.

4. Get Links from Sites your Competitors link to

Find where your competitors link TO in common, and get a link there!

If you take a closer look at your competition do not only check their backlinks but also check their outbound links. The more common links you find the more important it is for you to link to this specific website. Basically this is the concept of good co-citations. What could be better than getting a link from a website, my competitors consider as important? Check the quality and the strength of the link and then just go and fetch it.

5. Get Links on the Strongest Pages

Identify your strongest sub page to get the highest possible ranking.

Finally, you have found a strong domain on which you would like to get a link from. Now try to identify the best sub page of the website which is usually indexed in Google, has relevant content and many links to the page. Basically such a page can be seen as trusted and therefore you should definitely try to get a link on the strongest sub page.

6. Build Trust

Try to become a trusted!

You need links from trusted sites to also become trusted. Following the concept of good neighborhood and co-citations will definitely contribute to the concept of trust. Having a trusted domain implies that you will get more Return on Investment (ROI) on your links – simple because they work out better on trusted domain. A higher trust for your domain also means that you rank for more different keyword phrases, and that could be thousands new rankings! Also Google presents site links of all variations for trusted domains and that means, your search result can generate up to 40% more traffic to your website – simply by having those site links. Now that’s a promising goal, isn’t it?

7. The Best Links …

… are the links your competitors CAN NOT GET!

Needless to say, the best links are always those, your competitors cannot get. Checking the links of your competitors and try to get links they also have is the first step on your way. Next you should definitely try to get links on strong domains where your competitors do not have a link yet. Keep in mind to place your link in good neighborhood. Additionally find good co-citations your competitors haven’t found yet. The best strategy is always to be one step ahead.

These strategies should help your website to a better ranking. We know that it is very hard to find all the information you need and besides this that it is very time consuming. Therefore we have our Link Research Tools which help you to gather all the information you will need. These tools enable you to analyze the backlinks and anchor text your competitors have (BATT), find the common backlinks (CBLT) and outbound links (COLT), identify the strongest sub page of a domain (SSPT) and furthermore it will crawl every parameter you haven’t even thought of. In fact we do crawl over 40 different parameters for every single link. Give it a try!

Some time ago we wrote an article about the 7 Golden Rules of White Hat Link Building which explain link quality criteria, which is also an excellent guide to use.

What’s YOUR link building strategy that we missed?