A good selection of strategic links will set your web site apart when it comes to improving your search engine ranking. Developing a search engine optimisation strategy that reaps dividends will more often than not focus on a link building campaign. Although demanding of a good portion of any time spent on SEO, link strategy is one of the most rewarding elements of all optimisation activities thanks to its ability to generate increased traffic and better rankings.

In search engine terms, a link can be thought of as a vote of confidence; other web sites link back to your site when they believe you have something of interest for at least a portion of their own readership. Their willingness to direct traffic earns big search engine brownie points for the website on the other end of the link.

A good link strategy will see high-traffic sites linking back to your web site. The more traffic these sites have going through them, the higher your own traffic spike should be. Ideally, the sites linking back to your site will also have a higher PageRank in order to boost your own average and be relevant to your product, industry and target demographic. So how do you squeeze all these considerations in with the rest of your search engine optimisation concerns?

1.Use Your Competition

Your biggest nemesis is actually your greatest source of free help with it comes to SEO link building. There are lots of software packages designed to show the inbound links to a particular site. Use this tool to see who links to your competitors, creating a readymade target list of sites to approach for a link.

When you’ve researched the major competitors and created a list of sites, check those sites for relevance. Any that do not fit the bill need to be removed to avoid endangering your optimisation activities.

2. Follow Through

Having visited all of the web sites in your target list, you must decide on the best way to approach each site for a link back. How have your competitors approached their links? Do they have articles or adverts? If appropriate send an email to the site and then follow up with them.

3. Use The Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

Using the search engines themselves, type in the search terms related to your web site and then save the top ranking sites. Using more than one search engine (Yahoo, Google and MSN) and copying just the top 10 sites will provide a useful list of sites to browse through and select potential link partners.

4. Get Reading

Aside from search engine optimisation, a good link building strategy aims to direct as much relevant traffic to the target web site as possible. With that in mind, spend some time quizzing your clients and potential clients as to their favourite online destinations. Do they read e-zines or subscribe to the digital version of their favourite offline publications? If so, it’s worth adding those sites to your link request list – not only will you add more relevant inbound referrals to your link count and give the search engine spiders more chance of finding you, you’ll also be putting your brand in front of the right kind of audience, directing lots of valuable traffic your way.

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