Three Effective Steps To Link Building For Your SEO Strategy – The Free Way!

Link building strategies are one of the most prominent discussions amongst Internet Marketers today. As a search marketing professional, I have been working on search optimization campaigns before it was even considered a career. In fact, I am so old school, that the time I started it was considered pre-software for SEO and keyword analysis. This post can easily serve as your way to link building success.

Essentially most of the software for link building submits queries for search engines, which will be defined and taught to you throughout this mini-series post. These queries help identify possible link partners and probable websites that may help enhance your web presence.

Step 1: Website Strategy

Before you even start the process for link building, you need ‘keywords’ first. It is critical that you analyze industry focused keywords that are relevant to the websites products/services. This information provides invaluable information on the commercial value for ranking such relevant keywords. To gather this information, Internet marketers utilize real-time Pay-Per-Click data, such as costs and conversions. The data can be gathered through Google’s keyword tool. This data alone can help you to draw the right conclusions on your campaign goals and objectives.

Step 2: Advanced Search Operators

To help you better understand, I have narrowed the scope by providing you with the following example, for Nike Air Shoes. This is a very competitive keyword with over 61 million websites working to optimize in reaching the first page for search results.

The best place to find websites that Google considers relevant for the keyword is well, Google itself. Are you surprised? A simple Google search for our keyword ‘Nike Air Shoes’ returns the most relevant websites that Google algorithms have decided as worthy for primary organic position. However, these websites are considered competitors, which would be considered difficult when attempting to secure a link. That is why we utilize advanced search operators that help us discover the websites we can obtain a link from. Here are a few examples of such operators.

Start by searching for your keyword ‘Nike Air Shoes’, then follow up with the inurl: operator. This operator provides listings of the websites you may get links from by category of blogs, forums, sites, and fans.

KEYWORD inurl:blog
KEYWORD inurl:forum
KEYWORD inurl:site
KEYWORD inurl:fans

This search will provide a dozen or so potential linking partners. Once you have this data, export the date into an excel spreadsheet of the keyword, landing page URL, and the sites domain name.

Allintext: operator searches for websites that contain the keyword text within the content of the page.

Allintext: KEYWORD

Site: operator or -site: operator searches to restrict the query to either a certain domain, type of domain, or excluding a certain domain. The purpose of this is to discover sites that have certain TLDs such as .edu, .gov, .info, .me etc. that are either going to be high value links, or in some cases not very likely for your brand website that will allow for you to obtain target links.

Intitle: operator allows searches to find pages with the keyword present in the title. You may also add quotes to your search to force the query to present exact titled pages.

Kick It Into Ninja Gear

Now lets focus on narrowing our scope and combining search operators. This can be an effective way of locating golden websites.

Here are a couple of examples:

+“Nike Air Shoes” +inurl:blog +intitle:review
+”Nike Air Shoes” +buy +purchase +inurl:forum

These combinations may allow you to discover many more web pages as potential links to your website.

While gathering each landing page as a potential link, consider obtaining further information on the following such as: Google page rank, Alexa rank, and other metrics such as Tweets and Facebook likes that will help you to prioritize the list of what may be of importance. There are various toolbars that can make this job easier:

If you are a PC user you are in luck. Here is an excel add-in, which will allow you to gather information effortlessly.

Step 3: Make Contact With Each Website Owner

At this stage you are ready to start contacting website owners. You will have to find ways to reach website owners, and more often than not its not easy (are you really surprised?)!

Often (not always) there may be a contact page that will result in a published phone number (very lucky), email address (lucky), contact form (let’s hope they read it), or even a physical address (don’t bother – last resort). And if all of the above fail, then you will have to search deeper and look through domain records.

For record locator’s, we utilize WHO.IS. This information uncovers data on the name, address, and contact information of the owner of the domain, most of the time its an e-mail. This data is publicly available and we advise that you utilize such information with professional courtesy.

If the aforementioned fail, then you may have to become ambivalent in your quest. Search through the website to find possible links to the websites Twitter, Facebook, or other relevant Social Media networks. This method may help you to establish a connection and open an opportunity for a relevant link.

There you have it, three effective steps to expanding your link building strategy for SEO. Contact us for your search marketing campaign. We have the experience to build your web presence.