Linking Strategy

Without an effective linking strategy, your efforts are not being concentrated and thus you will not be gaining nearly as many search engine visitors interested specifically in what you have to offer. That's a bit confusing, so let me put it to you another way. Let's assume you're hunting whales. Would you rather be using a high powered harpoon or a net? Most fishermen would take the harpoon, because to control a whale with a net would require a major amount of power. Those whales aren't unlike highly competitive keywords. They're difficult to bag without a very targeted approach. Unless you've got literally 1000's of high quality links incoming to your website you're going to need a very targeted approach to taking on competitive keywords with any success.

Basic Link Campaign Strategy

The basic strategy to performing a successful link campaign involves 3 things. First, determine the keywords you want to target. Second, compile the list of websites you want to link you with those keywords. Third, contact those websites to obtain the links using link code you specify. The key component here is creating your own link code, and requiring sites that you link exchange with (or that you buy links from) to use this exact code. That way you can use a rifle approach to bagging the big keywords, instead of a shotgun approach.

Link Strategy Example

Here's an example, assuming I wanted to run a link campaign on this page for the keywords "linking strategy". I've already decided which keywords to target, so the first part is done. The second part is to compile a list of websites I want linking to this page. Assuming I had sifted through search engines or used a program to generate my list of potential link partners, let's move on to the final step. Now I'll be emailing each of those website's to request a link to this page, so I need some link code. I would make a few variations of the different anchor texts, but all would contain the keywords "linking strategy". This is a good way to keep your page popularity from becoming too "manufactured" when a search engine compiles all your link data. So my link codes might be:

<a href="http://www.backlinksbuilder.com/linking-strategy.php" title="Linking Strategy">Linking Strategy</a>

<a href="http://www.backlinksbuilder.com/linking-strategy.php" title="Effective Linking Strategy">Effective Linking Strategy</a>

<a href="http://www.backlinksbuilder.com/linking-strategy.php" title="Focused Linking Strategy">Focused Linking Strategy</a>

After you've got your link codes, the only thing left is to contact those websites and request link exchanges, paid link spots, or whatever barter you can make to obtain the needed backlinks. If you're doing a link exchange, I would recommend first linking to them from one of your pages (or sites) and including that in your email. Also, it's nice to mention the webmaster by name if you can determine his/her name from the site. It doesn't hurt to say something about their site to further personalize the email. Mass form link exchanges are often seen as no different from spam. A little extra effort can go a long ways. That's about all there is to basic linking strategy.