Search Engine Optimization Blog � SEM News & Opinion

Yesterday I was on Webmasterradio talking about link building. I was on with Disa Johnson aka airDisa and Daron Babin aka SEguru. We had a great time but there was just not enough time to talk about all the things I wanted to. Below is a list of link building tips that I prepared for the show.

1. First step to link building is to make sure all your incoming links go to existing pages or pages that have been redirected to existing pages.
2. Get a list of websites that mention you or your product but don’t link to your website and ask them to link to you. You can get this from Majestic SEO or by searching for your domain name or company name or product name in Google.
3. Find websites that link to more than one of your competitors. This means somebody is making a list of similar sites and there is a very good chance you can get them to add your site to the list. One tactic to help in this is to offer a coupon code specifically for that site. Don’t just use a unique random code make it a word that reflects the site name or subject. Search Return will let you do this by uploading your backlinks from Yahoo or you can use an export from linkrep.seofox.com or many of the other backlink providers.
4. Study your competitor’s backlink profile. This will let you see what types of sites they get links from. It helps to find out what types of sites link to your type of website. It also helps find the type of content people link to. This will give you ideas to create new content that will attract links. You can do this with many of the different backlink tools out there.
   Find broken links to your competitors and inform the site owner that the link is broken and ask them to link to you.
5. Find sites that link to you with URL’s or junk words like “click here” or “more info” and contact the site owner to change it to a keyword.
6. Find bloggers that have blogged about your competitors and ask them to write a blog about you. Offer them something like a free product, or service.
7. Directory submissions still work for long tail keywords. I have run a lot of reports recently and we are seeing top sites with thousands of directory links. The key is getting a good list of directory links.