7 Golden Link Building Strategies

2010-03-02 Christoph C. Cemper

02 Mar

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7 Golden Link Building Strategies

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!

271,000,000 results for the phrase

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

Link Building is a very tedious job

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.

Check their links and outrank the competitors.

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.

Find common backlinks of your competitors.

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!

Look at your competitors.

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.

Find the strongest sub page.

5. Get Links on the Strongest Pages

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

Find the best page to link from.

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!

Building trust

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!

Be one step ahead.

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 (BLP), find the common backlinks (CBLT) and outbound links (LJT), 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?

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35 Responses to 7 Golden Link Building Strategies

Scott
March 2, 2010 at 2:10 pm
That is a fantastic Part 1 showing WHAT TO DO. In Part 2 can you go into some detail on HOW TO DO each of these 7 steps?

Seriously though, great overview guys.

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Zelluloid
March 2, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Good work, thank you. Especially # 3 is a lot of work, but it helps.

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Christoph C. Cemper
March 2, 2010 at 3:31 pm
@scott – thanks for the great feedback – we’re planning a follow up on the EXACT steps HOW TO do it

@zelluloid – if you use the CBLT tool at least the researching part is something you can automate

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Wynne
March 2, 2010 at 11:02 pm
I agree with doing a google search on relevant keyword terms and finding relevant websites to get backlinks on.

But I don’t pay a lot of attention to competitive analysis. Sometimes I can get ranked for the craziest competitive words, and other times I can’t even get ranked for the dumbest least competitive word without doing a ton of work. So go figure on that one.

There is a lot more to backlink building such as use of social media networks to get backlinks, building buzz that is having a lot more of an effect then it used to. That’s evidenced by the prevalence of twitter, facebook, and youtube listings turning up in search results.

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Betty
March 3, 2010 at 5:41 am
Thanks for sharing. I have been hearing a lot about backlinks. Your site is a very innovative site. I plan to use more backlinks thanks to you.

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Mobiel Abonnement
March 3, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I have bin reading a lot about link building but never think about cheking out going links of Competitors link outs

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Björn
March 3, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Again a great article. I´m always looking forward for new stuff on your Blog. Other than other Blogs that post more frequently I really like the profound quality and thought through posts of this one.
#1 “google is always right” is a good and easy one I haven´t thought about. Thanks an go on with such good work.

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Ann Arbor
March 3, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Great post! You hardly ever see these *high* level posts on linkbuilding. I use many of these strategies day to day to level the playing field and get ahead of my competition.

Another strategy you could use: find writers on Examiner.com or Demand Media and pitch them your article ideas. If you can provide a good idea, they will definitely link back to your site in the story.

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Arama Motoru Optimizasyonu
March 4, 2010 at 4:31 am
Hello friend,
First of all,I would like to mention that you summarize here the link building strategy the best. I completely agree with you for these 7 golden link building techniques.

For Seo campaigns link building is important but in my opinion Google Page Rank is not so important. Except PR factors,there are so many other important factors affecting Google Ranks. Optimization /inside site factors, the name of domain,the age of the domain,social media usage etc.

Congragulations for this great Seo article.
I will visit your web site again.

See you again

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John Wright
March 4, 2010 at 11:22 pm
#2 is the simplest of them all. Easily find out where the competition get links from and do the same.

#5 is good and very underrated.

Great article and worth sharing.

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Nigel Burke
March 26, 2010 at 2:38 pm
This is an awesome blog post. Link building has always been something that I have somewhat misunderstood but this put it into a new perspective. If you follow these 7 golden rules, you are guaranteed to link better.

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Mike
April 6, 2010 at 12:14 pm
great post. I have looked at various link-building services and while they all promise a plethora of high quality links, none of them can tell you how to actually check that these links have been obtained. With Google supposedly only showing a fraction of links how can one get this information accurately to justify SEO expense? Is the only measure for SEO a number 1 position? any thoughts here? thanks

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Chris
September 26, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Good stuff. A nice succinct summary without the usual “seo-lore” you read about on so many other sites.

At the end of the day it’s a lot of hard work…. something non-seo’s just don’t get!!

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Grumpy Old SEO
December 24, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Great tips there. No.4 is the toughest to achieve for sure. And no.7 is the key, those links will be the most valuable. But for how long? The problem is that any link you obtain can then be identified and copied by your competitors. I wonder if there any strategies for getting exclusive links?

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r00tb0x
January 25, 2011 at 1:31 am
I believe that the first Golden Rule is the most important of them all. With regards to competition analysis, do you guys use any particular techniques to get hold of how competition get backlinks? I use google but it is very time consuming and was wondering about scripting something for automating the process.

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michaelah Reply:
February 1st, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Hey r00tb0x,

We developed the Link Alerts on http://www.LinkResearchTools.com specifically for that. It allows you to see new back links as they get in, even for your competitors! Link Alerts regularly and automatically crawl more than a dozen backlink sources to find out new links to any site and send you an e-mail as soon as we find anything new.
It doesn’t tell you *how* your competitors got those links, but it tells you where they are, making it easy to check them out – you’ll find out pretty soon.

If you have further questions about the Link Alerts or the LinkResearchTools in general, contact us using this contact form: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/contact/

Kind Regards,
Christoph

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Dave (RD Legal Funding)
February 10, 2011 at 5:41 am
Great run down on link building strategies. I love the part about finding a domain that a competitor is getting a link from, and digging deeper to find the strongest sub-page to establish a back link. Very powerful stuff, and I look forward to using your site as one of my marketing resources in the future. Definitely interested in the Link Research Tools Product. Thanks!

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jurnal ilmu
March 17, 2011 at 8:43 am
Nice posting.. I want to try to practice to my blog… I’ nubie blogger from makassar

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tasmurah
March 17, 2011 at 8:46 am
I love the part about finding a domain that a competitor is getting a link from, and digging deeper to find the strongest sub-page to establish a back link. I use google but it is very time consuming and was wondering about scripting something for automating the process.

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Avenir
April 1, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Press releases written by an SEO firm can contain a carefully worded title, well placed keywords and a link to the site that is the subject of the article. SEOs have been using press release services for some time, and as with many other things, the more you spend, the better distribution is. Press releases can also rank well on their own, particularly in the first few days/weeks of release as they receive the ‘fresh content’ boost in the SERPs.

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maymur
April 5, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Thank you for sharing some important tricks.

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drawbloodpoker
May 3, 2011 at 8:36 am
Backlinks are the key to traffic.How long does it take for google to check my backlins. I have been building backlinks, it is not that hard, but sure is boring.

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Charlie
May 22, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Makes a lot of sense. I prefer building great content that other people share for me though.

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Abdu
June 8, 2011 at 1:55 am
It is really good advise in building link, I always confuse to find best link partner. thanks for the advice.

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Kuoid
July 2, 2011 at 10:35 pm
There is a lot of quality advice here. I was looking for more information on how to gain these links rather than the practice, but it has given me something to consider in my strategies

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Michael Chibuzor
July 22, 2011 at 3:51 pm
This is good friend. How to get backlinks easily. I love this post and I’m bookmarking. Thanks a bunch

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Sergii Lazurenko
August 26, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Nothing Special! General information but anyway thank you.

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Travis Young
September 1, 2011 at 1:43 am
Thanks for the great post about strategies for link building. I was wondering…did that post on HOW TO do these strategies ever get published?

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greg smith
January 26, 2012 at 12:23 pm
I’m a relatively new SEO company owner, and I have truly found a ton of awesome information within this site. This blog post is the best. I plan to purchase a membership to your new backlink tool. What an amazing site guys!

I also see how long it took you to get to where you are at today, that’s just another reason to continue to encourage the newer generations to continue to push forward, in this very difficult market.

Thank You CEMPER.COM

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ERP Implementation
July 6, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Good Tips.. I am always looking to learn something new. Thank you so much.

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Sarah
August 22, 2012 at 7:17 pm
All seven points are very useful and such a golden link building strategies and seeing you competitors links is very useful point for me i must work on that to get some good results.

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Damien Town
November 24, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Thanks so much for sharing. I had no idea that backlinks had such a strong influence on successful SEO strategies. Keep up the good work.

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aven
November 28, 2012 at 11:15 am
Very good! External links are important , but inner links is also very important, and it is one link of affecting Google rankings

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Monica Dillon
December 3, 2012 at 11:59 pm
I know I’m late to the party since this post was written in 2009, but it’s amazing how relevant it still is today. As we think about the recent Panda, Penguin, et. updates by Google, every single piece of advice you have laid out is still relevant and timeless, it seems.

The takeaway – focus on staying ahead of your content by building relevant content for users, promote it as best you can via social media, networking, and make sure your site is crawl-able, loads quickly, is mobile optimized, and has social signals. It goes without saying, but also make sure you are optimizing for the keywords your visitors are actually looking for.

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Christoph C. Cemper Reply:
December 4th, 2012 at 9:25 am
Hi Monica,
indeed the rules of link quality have hardly changed. Have you checked out the 7 goles rules of link building here also? http://www.cemper.com/seo-knowhow/white-hat-link-building/
They are almost unchanged today as well. Major takeaway is, quality links are a sustainable thing to work with.

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