Link building is one of the most important factors you need to consider when running a SEO campaign. Most SEO campaigns can fall short in this area and one of the main reasons is because of the time and effort that goes in to link building. Over the next few weeks I will be going over how you can run a successful linking campaign. I will be breaking down all the different types of link building there is and some of the do’s and don’ts to link building and how to be successful with your company. Remember link building is something you and your company/client should be working on constantly. I am going to break down link building into these major categories:

I will be going into detail about each of these link building strategies. One of the first things you need to before diving into those sections is to find out where your backlink counts currently stand. This will give you a good idea of where you should begin. If you don’t have a lot of backlinks article distribution or press releases are good starting points. If you have some backlinks maybe some directories or a one-way linking campaign is where you need to start. If you have a lot of links but are still not gaining a whole lot of traffic, social linking is where you want to start. Either way you need to do some research before starting. After you have found out where you stand you are going to want to evaluate the anchor text of your back links. Make sure that the link text being used is providing the most value to you. Make sure that as many backlinks as possible are using a keyword you are targeting in their anchor text. If they are, check to see where you are ranking for that specific keyword. This will help determine if you should continue to target that link text or not.

Next you are going to want to determine what keyword phrases you want to rank for. You want to be sure when doing your linking campaign that you have a clear objective as far as what keywords you want to see rankings for. Linking is a great way to get you from that 5th or 6th position to that 1-3 position. After you know the keyword phrases you want to target you need to pick the URL that these links should point to. The home page is not always the best URL for the keyword you are targeting so be sure to match it up as best as you can (the URL you pick should be based on your initial backlink check you did, if you are ranking for a keyword with a specific URL be sure to use that URL in your link campaign).

Don’t forget to keep track of everything you are doing. This will make things a lot easier as you go through your linking campaign. Keep track of where you stand right when you begin the campaign and then make minor adjustments as time goes on. Next week I will be talking about social linking. If anyone has any comments or more suggestions/tips on where to start on a linking campaign I’d love to hear from you.