Some free link building tips that will help you to get to number 1 in Google

OK so it may not be as simple as that but, as one of the senior SEO Consultants here at I-COM, I thought it was about time I shared some of my tips and tricks that I've gathered over nearly 10 years of Search Engine Optimisation and link building.

While we all know that social media (microblogging, etc.) is fast becoming the new metric for Google to measure the relevancy and freshness of websites (and rank accordingly) it's still important to remember that links are still the life blood of the internet and a properly managed backlink building campaign can generate qualified traffic and better conversions.

So, we're not talking about a link building free-for-all like the old days where 'the most backlinks wins' in the listings race - we're talking about quality links from on-topic sites, with authority and relevancy in a specific niche or topic.

So how do we go about getting these types of back links? Well the simple answer is there are many different ways and over the next few months I will begin to give you some idea of the various methods and techniques that I've used (and still use) to find these back links.

It's worth remembering that before you begin researching back-links it's a very time-consuming process - you'll need to set aside lots of time (and energy) to the process. You'll need to understand what makes a back link good or bad for your website.  Think about it - have you got the time to do this? If not, are you better off outsourcing this process?

Adrian's Link Building Tip #1

Identify your competitors in the Google listings - then you can identify their back-link footprint (the number of back-links they have, the quality of those links and where they are). You will need to understand what keywords you want to your web site to be found for and who your main competitors are in the top ten listings. Here's what I do:

Make sure you have a full list of the products or services being sold or supplied by the web site. From this I can check each of the keyword phrases in Google to find the top ten competitors. For example, if the web site is a law firm and it's based in Northampton, check in the top ten listings in Google for the keyword phrase 'solicitors in Northampton':



Once I have a list of the top ten competitors for the keyword phrase "solicitors in Northampton" I can check the back-links to each of the individual competitor web-sites using Yahoo Site Explorer:



Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool that lets you access the information Yahoo has about a site's online presence. You can see which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search, track sites that link into each webpage, and view the most popular pages from any site. Use Site Explorer to:

• Find which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search
• Find inlinks or pages that link to any site or any page
• View the most popular pages from any site

Yahoo Site Explorer only allows you access the information for 1,000 back-links. There are other methods to find out about competitor back-links but I'll save that for another day.

With Yahoo Site Explorer you'll need to make sure that you click on the Inlinks button (highlighted in the images below) and that you change the drop down to exclude links from within the domain you're researching - otherwise Yahoo Site Explorer will show you all the internal links of the web site as well.



Once you've done this you should have nice list of back-links to the website which you can export using the "Export first 1,000 results to TSV" link.



Make sure that you import the TSV links using MS Excel.




You'll now have a nice list of your competitors' back-links to help you find suitable inbound links; i.e. sites featuring the same or similar subject matter with well-written content that is not duplicated on other web sites. Also make sure that the links you pursue are on pages with a less than 100 links on them as Google doesn't like more than 100 links on a web page. Also, you will want to find the contact details for the webmaster or owner(s) of the web site. These are whole different tasks in itself and something I will discuss in some detail in the next few posts.