Link building as we all know is the key concept in the battle to achieve high search engine rankings in Google, but it is also one of the hardest things to do. when it comes to building links i often find that its not as much about quantity as it is quality. At the end of the day getting 100 pr0 links will be alot of work but probably not as effective as 10 pr4 links, the same can apply to relevance. Its better to get travel links for a hotels website than getting links relating to tanks or gardening.
So really what you want is relevant links with a high PR and try and get some anchor text (the text that is in the link) with good keywords in it. Sound simple enough? Well at the end of the day it is a lot of hard work, but one of the ways to take some of the strain out of the work is to use your competirors. You see the chance are they have already done this hard work, after all they are ranking at the top of the search engine results! You can actually get tools that allow you to see what sites are linking to them. The best one i use is IBP, now it does cost £200 but you dont have to pay that to use the link checker tool. The demo version allows you to type in a URL and it will display the first 100 sites that link to it, but whats even better is that it displays the anchor text used, PR of the page and exact URL!
Now once you have this information it is time to visit these sites and get them to link to you aswell, some will have an add url button but for others just use the contact us area. Now if you do this for all the sites in the top 10 of the search rankings for your chosen keyword then you will be well on your way to acheiving success.
But there are more ways to building links, try starting a blog, search engines love blogs due to the fact that there is constatnly new information to find. So pick a topic and get writing, another thing to do is type into google your keyword and the word forum. This should find a forum on the topic area and you can usually put signature links into your posts on forums. So if you have a good knowledge of your topic area you can share this with people and get links to your website in return.
Ok one last tip for link building, try and get one way links when possible and also vary your link (anchor) text so that search engines dont penalise you for unatural linking. Also dont just think about your homepage when linking try and get some internal pages linked as it will help those pages rank higher in the search engines.
Enjoy!
