Link Building Tip: How to Do It the Smart Way

Your competitors just met their match...

SEO traffic is something that we all crave for; even those bloggers who say they could care less what their Google rankings are – yeah, right.

It’s true that there are many factors that go into deciding where in the search engine hierarchy your site will fall – anything from how well you do your on-page optimization, like your title, description, H1-H6 tags, etc to, of course, how many and what quality links you have.

• If you are interested in learning more about search engine ranking factors, take a look at this post at SEOMoz – it’s an oldie, meaning the importance of certain factors has shifted one way or the other, but the general picture remains the same.

Why Link Building is Still a Must

One of the factors that is still going strong is backlinks.

I remember how in one of my Sunday Coffee with Ana posts (which I, unfortunately, had to stop doing due to work overload), one misguided participant said that links didn’t matter any longer.

I don’t know where he learned his SEO, but just for fun, here’s the chart that strongly suggests otherwise (the chart was sent to me by Randy Pickard after he read the comment I referred to above – great networking skills on his part, by the way):

With that being said, the reason for this post is a question I got from one of my dear online friends and loyal readers:

Ana, I have no clue how to even start a link building campaign. What do I do first? What’s the best way to find links that will help me rank better?

Link Building Ana’s Way (the easy way)

So what do I do find the best possible linking partners for any given keyword?

Since I am very big on leverage, I go straight to my competitors and see what they’ve got that I can use.

Go back to Step 2 (Study Your Competition) and Step 3 (Make a Plan) of my 7 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination workbook to read more in depth about how I do competition research.

However, for the sake of this post, I will tell you about the only one I ever use – Market Samurai.

Quick video summary:

1. Create a new project for your keyword.
2. Go to “SEO Competition”.
3. Generate results for the top 10 competitors for your keyword.
4. From the drop down arrow next to URL, click on PR Analysis.
5. Go get a cup of coffee while Market Samurai fetches all the backlinks your top competitor has.
6. After you have the list, click on “Anchor Text Analysis” – this function will get you all the anchor texts used by your competitor for the backlinks you just fetched.
7. Go get as many same/similar links as you can.
8. Rinse and repeat with competitor #2.
9. Do all your link building SLOWLY and OVER TIME.

If you don’t have a copy of Market Samurai yet, don’t fret: here’s the link to a free trial, so you’ll be able to see what I am talking about first hand.

Plus, you’ll get an awesome 35% discount should you decide to buy it (and you most definitely should).

Marketing Takeaway

Link building is a must.

Market Samurai is the easiest way I know to build links. Period.

And in response to my friend’s question about where to start his link building, I sent him a file that included my Market Samurai research of his competitors.

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