Human Website

Hi Silva, thanks for the question. I agree with you that building backlinks is one of the toughest things you have to do for SEO. According to SEOMoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011, link building is No.1 factor that determines your Search Engine Ranking.

Here are the step by step for link building.

Step 1: Setting up a goal and a link campaign
What do you want to achieve? Which keyword you want to build links? What strategy you want to use? How long you want to achieve it? These are the questions you have to answer.

Step 2: Identify the challenges in link building
- no-follow links, deleted links, image links, mentions, alt text and redirect. These are the links that may not help you. It is Google to determine which links are counted for SEO. I don't against buying links but the question is where do you buy from? Google will punish your website if you buy a lot of links from link farms, spammed websites, etc. Since Google may not give link juice to all links, I believe you have to invest small amount of money to get quality link result.

Step 3: Wordtracker and Majestic SEO
These two link building tools will help you to take out the links that don't help you (included those that I mentioned above), they will only give you quality links by analyzing your competitors. Before using Wordtracker or Majestic SEO, do keyword research on Google Adwords. If your market is US or UK, you can even use Wordtracker and Majestic SEO to do keyword research (this is for anchor text purpose).

After analyzing the right keywords, put those keywords on Google search to get top 10 results (your top 10 competitors) and put them in your Wordtracker or Majestic SEO link campaigns.

Step 4: Draft your link strategies
Wordtracker and Majestic SEO will keep sending you link prospects. Draft link strategies. e.g submit to directories, become guest blogger, comment on other people's blogs, etc. I personally prefer guest blogging because it help me in build human relationship as well.

Step 5: Reviewing your link campaign by checking your Search Engine Ranking
You have to keep reviewing and evaluating your link campaign so that you will know which strategies work for you the most.

Hope this help you, Silva!

Hi Silva,

From my perspective, Wordtracker and MajesticSEO are the best tool. The prices are average, not so expensive and they can give you very high quality links.

I am using Wordtracker. In Wordtracker, they will help you to analyze your competitors and separate into 10 categories:

1. Must Have Links
2. Directories
3. Blog
4. Co-Linking
5. Trusted Sites
6. Social Media
7. News Media
8. Job Sites
9. Business Sites
10. Shopping Sites

Each categories need different link strategies. For example, if you go for blog links, most probably you need to become a guest blogger or comment on other people's blog. For social media, you have to post quality content to attract readers. For directories, you may have to pay to list your website on a directory. E.g, you have to pay Yahoo Directory US$299 to submit your link.

The meaning of broken links are links that don't work any more. While the meaning of dead links are links that points to a webpage or server that is permanently unavailable.

Hope I answered your questions!