As I discussed in the last post, gaining backlinks to your website is one of THE most important things you can do to improve your search engine rankings and if done correctly it can give you significant gains. Backlinking is no longer just about quantity, it's about the quality of the links you get. In a sense quantity of links still comes into it, of course you want to have as many links as possible BUT this should not be your intitial aim of the link building process.

The problem many people find with backlinks is that they often don't know where to get them from, certainly there are processes we can all follow like submitting articles, blog commenting, web 2.0 link building, cherry picking and the list goes on and on but if you don't target your link building efforts in the right places then you may be working a lot harder than you need to.

If I told you that I have a site which ranked number 35 in Google for my chosen two word phrase which I took to position number 2 within just over a week and a half would you belive me, well I hope you would but it sounds a little unlikely right? Before you get yourselves over excited I don't have some magic formula which I'm going to reveal to you, I don't have the answer to pummle the Google algorithm. What I do have though is good detective skills, a little time and a lot of patience. By using my detective skills and my time I always identify exactly who my competitors are in the search engines, where they rank and what they are ranking for, but most importantly I find out where their backlinks are coming from! By analysing the top 10-20 results for my chosen keyword phrase I was able to mark out:

1. The number of backlinks to each of my main competitors
2. The PR of the sites linking in to them
3. The extension of the domain linking in e.g. .edu,.gov,.com etc
4. Whether the links were "Dofollow" or "NoFollow"
5. What anchor text was used in the link, if any
6. The overall quality of the website linking in

In doing this I was able to obtain 10-15 very good quality links from niche specific websites directly related and within my niche area, 50% of which were "Dofollow" and two were .edu websites with Google PR of 4 and 5. I then slowly built backlinks from these sources over the period of around a week and let then sat back and watched as my rankings increased over the next week or so.

How To 'Play Detective'

There are several ways of finding the backlinks to a website, the easiest and quickest is by using the following search: link:htt://thedomainname.com. The only problem with this is that you then have to visit each site directly and find out the information I mentioned above. An easier way to do this is to use something like SEOQuake (free plugin for Firefox) or the Traffic Travis (Free Version) keyword tool which enables you to pull up all the backlinks for a website across 3 major search engines along with ip adress, anchor text, Google PR, domain TLD and much more! This information is invaluable to have at your fingertips.

Other Factors To Consider

There are a couple of other factors to consider here, my site didn't just jump above the other sites based on the new backlinks. If my direct competition had been too strong then this process would have been a whole lot more challenging but the fact of the matter was that I knew by looking directly at their sites that my site was far more well optimized (on page) for my chosen two word phrase. In addition my site is not brand new, I built it around 4 months ago, let it sit and did only small amounts of promotion and tweaking, allowing the site to truly find it's own position. If you try and force your position and more importantly if you try and force your position when the site is very new, expect to find yourself in the Sandbox!

Allowing your site to find it's place in the search engines naturally is very important, once your site is well established it's a lot easier to play around with it's rankings.

Remember patience, build slowly, build quality, do it the right way!

Similar Posts Which May Be Of Interest:

• Backlinks For SEO – Quality Rather Than Quantity!
• Link Building – The Right Way & The Wrong Way!
• Getting FREE Traffic to Your Affiliate Website
• Use the Power of Blog Commenting For Web Traffic
• Generating Article Ideas – The ‘RIGHT’ phrase!