DAY 20: Finding Link Partners

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Link building is the hardest part of SEO

Today is the last real lesson of our 21 Days SEO Mastery course, as tomorrow will be used to review all what we have done.

You now almost know how to do everything regarding SEO, except one last point, and that’s link building.

In order for you to build backlinks for your site, you first need to find link partners; this is what we are going to review today.

Competitive Search

The best way is to start trying to get links from the sites your competition is getting their backlinks from.

Ideally, you are using SEO Elite and you can directly focus your work on the best links matching your SEO needs.

If not, another method is to look at the search engines backlinks results:

• Type “link:competitor.com” in Google.

• Type “linkdomain:competitor.com” in Yahoo.

It‘s definitely not as neat or refined as what you get with SEO Elite, but it’s better than nothing.

Article Directories

Article directories can be used in 2 different manners:

• Getting one way links back through writing articles and submitting them.
• Finding link partners by looking at who uses the articles in the directories.

Keep in mind that the backlinks you get from article marketing tend to have a low SEO value, so their purpose should be more oriented towards deep linking of your pages than actually ranking high for a search term.

Nonetheless, where article marketing lacks in quality, it makes up in quantity. Not the best trade, but better than nothing.

The leverage obtained there for the amount of work required is extremely attractive.

Each article published will be reproduced and build backlinks for you over and over for the rest of your life without you having anything to do with it.

Link Exchange

This is probably the most popular way (and the easiest) to acquire backlinks.

You basically agree to link towards another person site, where in exchange, that person will link back to your from your site so that you’ll both benefit from it.

Please note that Google has been seriously catching up with this kind of link building technique bet it 2 ways linking or 3 ways linking and have severely devalued those links.

Nonetheless, they still can help you in your backlink quest.

Different methods of doing link exchange include:

• Links page directory exchange.
• Blogroll links exchange.
• Trackbacks.

Joining a link exchange network can facilitate your search of link partners. A link exchange network is composed of webmasters willing to do link exchange.

Search Engine Queries

Going for broke, in the last resort, use search engine queries to find link partners.

Since most of the people trading links or willing to do link exchange tend to have a link page themselves, the easiest way is to do a search in Google:

• “links.html ” returns 381,000,000 results.

• “links.php” returns 180,000,000 results.

One very neat trick to refine your search is to type “+” and your keyword, so that you’ll find links pages that are relevant to your keyword:

Play around with broad search and exact search, to find what fit you and your site the best!

Exercise

Now that you know how many links you need, it’s time for you to use the method best fitting you to find the appropriate link partners for your link building campaign!

Build your links naturally, and don’t engage into link scheme promising you 10,000 links overnight or such, as this would raise a red flag towards your site and possibly lead to a penalty from Google!

Give yourself a target and stick to it, like building 10 links each day for example.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.