Ok so you have your website. Your site is 100% done (no under construction pages) and you’re ready to start your SEO link campaign. But before you start your seo link campaign you need to go over a few critical points before you start building up your backlinks.
Before you start your link campaign, make sure:
Your website is completely done
Whenever you start your seo marketing you want to make sure your website is 100% done. Google dosen’t like it when you have “coming soon” or “under construction” pages on your site. Here is the google webmaster guidelines explain how they treat coming soon pages.
Get your on-site SEO done
There is no reason why you would start your SEO link building unless you are fully happy with your onsite SEO. Spend the time working on your on-site SEO before you start working on your off-site SEO. This is not a guideline, its just common sense. You want to make sure the google spiders love your site as much as they EVERYTIME they visit your site. So make sure your 100% done with your on-site SEO.
Make a SEO plan, and follow it
Most successful businesses have a business plan. A business plan outlines everything the business will do to return a positive ROI. You should do the same so your seo link building campaign returns you a positive ROI, whether its a return-on-investment of your time or money. Even if your seo link building plan is simple, you still have a better chance to rank for your term then someone who just wakes up one day and decides to buy some random links off digitalpoint.
The best thing you can do is sit down and plan every aspect of gaining links. I usually say I will do 3 or 4 different link building methods in a certain amount of time, once that is done I will sit down and take a look at all the data. I will see what is working and what isn’t working for that site/key word. After that I will adjust my link building campaign to get the highest ROI for my time and money. For an example, this site I’m working on this week my plan is to write 100 blog comments, 200 dofollow bookmarks, and 500 directory submissions. After I do all that and then wait 2-3 weeks I will see where I am at with my rankings. I will look at all my data and see what I need to work on for that seo link campaign.
Starting your SEO Link Campaign
This is part one, the research of your link campaign. Right now you have your website, your keywords, and some money to spend (or lots and lots of time to use submitting to directory’s or writing blog comments 
). Now you need to research your main competitors to see what you need to do better to beat them. You may only need to get a few links to beat your competitors, or you may need to get 100,000 backlinks, you will have to see using this method. You also need to know how well your competitors on-site SEO is done. Sometimes your competitor has 5,000 backlinks, but you may only need 500 backlinks to beat him for that term, the reason is because your competitors on-site SEO is crappy and your websites’ content (on-site SEO) is more relevant then your competitors. Duh… but how do we get all of this info?
Looking at your competitors link building methods
Getting your competitors link building methods is easy. But it does take time to see exactly what your competitors are doing, which you will easily build after researching your competitors backlinks. Now there are TONS of different ways to gain backlinks such as directory’s, paid links, blog comments, social bookmarks, blog comment spam, forum spamming, link exchanges, generating your own websites to use as relevant backlinks, etc, etc, etc. You need to look at your competitors list of backlinks and tell what exactly they are doing. Which is something you will easily learn how to do after do it a few times.
To view my competitors backlinks I use Yahoo search. Simply put “site:” before the url and it will show your that sites pages and inbound links. And for the most part Yahoo is pretty accurate. When you view a competitors inbound links you should be able to tell how the site is gaining its backlinks. If they are using directorys then you will see a lot of directorys on that page, if they are using paid links then you will see keep seeing the same site over and over again (if they are doing sitewide text links). Its the same with blog comments, social bookmarks, spamming, etc. You will be able to see how they are getting there links.
Examples:
Ok, so using the keyword “idaho payday loan” we will look at the top 2 results for that term and see how they got there links.
Site 1
www.mypaydayloan.com/idaho-payday-loans.htm
Backlinks: 3,188
Domain Created: 1999
At very first glance I can see they they did directory’s and link exchanges, I can see that because most of the first half of the links are link exchanges or directorys. But after about the first half of the page the links get shadier and shadier. I can see some websites where it appears that they have either purchased the links or made the website specifically to get backlinks to there website, this method is used all the time. Simply buy a few .infos and set up wordpress on them, then load them with some shitty content and give your main website a few links. Then find some inexpensive way to get those .infos backlinks, such as spamming. Those sites will gain backlinks, which in return gain your main site backlinks. Well it appears that this guy either did that or buy some links, one example is here.
It also appears that this guy spent a lot of time doing link exchanges. You can see one example here. To get these backlinks all you need to do is type in payday loans “link exchanges” (example) in google search and you find hundreds of sites that would love to link exchange with you. Only problem with that is the success rate is very low. I did this last week, I sent out 20 emails asking for a link exchange, its been about 1 week and only 3 people out of those 20 emails contacted me to link exchange. But the quality is pretty decent, most of the time its worth the time to put into link exchanging your website like this.
Ok so, the first page on Yahoo mostly has link exchanges and directory’s. Now lets skip a few pages in. I am still seeing a bunch of directory’s, link exchanges, and shady websites that look to be set up to link exchange with each other, the same way as an SEO empire. They also have a sitewide link on the web tracking site. I would consider that a purchased link, the way that link is camouflaged within the testimonial looks a lot like a purchased text link to me. They might be trying to trick google there.
Site 2
http://www.idahopaydayloans.com/
Backlinks: 93
Domain Created: 2004
At very first glance I can see it would be pretty easy to beat this site in the SERPS. Not only does the site only has 93 backlinks, but all those backlinks are pretty much from a handful of sites. Having 93 baclinks from different websites is way better then having 93 backlinks from 15 websites. Its physics really.
But thats not all, this site ranked up by using spamming! It looks like this guy is using comment spam to rank up. Its very beatable, just report them. You can see some examples of there spamming work here and here. This site was very easy to see there link building methods, all they are doing is spamming. The quality of those links are horrible, this site would be very easy to beat for that term “idaho payday loans”.
Conclusion
Above we looked at 2 very different link building methods. One site the guy was very seo white hat and did link exchanges, directory submissions, making his own SEO empire, and purchasing links to gain his well earned sport for that term. Although this guy does have quality backlinks, its very beatable.
The other guy used blog comment spam to rank up for his term. His site would be very very beatable for that term. I would say that all you need is about 50 quality links to beat that guy. But since his site is from 2004 it would take a little time to get the trust from google to get in the top 3.
Ok so now you know how to look at your competitors backlinks. My next blog post I will be going over what link building methods you should use for a certain term, because each term is different. If you have any questions please ask them in the blog comments below, I will answers them to the best of my abilities.
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now let’s wait for the owners of the above mentioned sites to give their comments here
I would love if they did come and comment on my blog post
Looking forward to part 2 to see your thoughts on link building methods for certain keywords.
Jon, I love it when you take the time to write something good, that was an excellent article! I’ve got 3 questions for you:
1. What does the email you send out to people for link exchanges look like?
2. Do you have a list of free directories you submit the sites too, which you could share?
3. Is there a special way to test a Wordpress blog for nofollow on comments without actually visiting and looking through the code? cURL perhaps?
Keep up the blogging, looking forward to part 2!
I will post a little tutorial later today on sending out link exchange emails. Its pretty easy, it just takes time.
With the directory’s, I usually pay someone. There are a ton of people out there that do directory’s these days, so there are always good deals.
With the nofollow links, I actually never look at that. I usually post a comment on a blog for seo link building even though the links are nofollow. I still see results.
I like these walkthrough style posts
Nice article dude.
Very awesome article! I’ve been researching back link strategies for the past week and am slowly starting to understand what they are all about. It’s people like you, Jon, who inspire all of us!
I hope you don’t mind me using my website’s link in this comment.
Else there is this: http://majesticseo.com which is connected to the majestic-12 distributed crawler project http://www.majestic12.co.uk/ (they welcome any help).
It allows you to see free information like this:
[i]Domain jonwaraas.com: 2 subdomain(s), 117 pure links, 544 page(s) (33 redirect), 64,587 backlink(s) (ext ref domains: 1,331) (34,841 external (53.94%), 18 redirect, 3 frame(s), 5,218 image links, 1,931 no follow, 3,172 deleted)[/i]
You can buy complete backlinks history for a site, and soon there will be a monthly subscriptions that should be cheaper than buying the whole link profile of a site.
It’s a shame Goog doesn’t list all it’s backlinks. It’s funny how these backlink battles build up with competing sites. My main competitor has even blocked my IP so I can’t view any of his sites. He’s either very worried or up to something. Have you ever come across this?
Hi John, when you lay out your strategy to:
“my plan is to write 100 blog comments, 200 dofollow bookmarks, and 500 directory submissions”
Roughly how much time does this typically take you? How much of this have you automated? and do you use any tools to automate and/or simplify the process.
Are you in Idaho? I grew up in Boise…miss the northwest a lot sometimes.
anyway, thanks for any response.
This is actually one of the reasons I started the SEO service company. Because I get my price on most seo link building methods. So for me its pretty much automated.
I actually made a script that will submit all my seo sites to my seo service backend so they automatically get new links every month ( I will be offering this service soon).
I actually did write the 100 comments, that only took me a little over an hour. The reason is because I am always studying how wordpress manages there comments
But I paid for the bookmarks, and directory’s.
Yep, Im in Idaho Falls. I love Idaho its great here
Hey Jon!
I’, curious how you did so many comments in such little time! Do you do dofollow only comments or nofollow?
I take much longer to do 100 comments, and sometimes i get askimeted!
I was using the tools that we use over at http://www.buyblogcomments.com
askimet is a pain, just remeber to keep changing your email often, and dont get your domain banned or that will become a huge pain. If your domain is banned then you have to find a way to get it unbanned.
Do you have a directory submission service that you recommend?
Not a technique I like but used
Really awesome comments everyone, so much to be learnt!
I will follow your advice Jon, thanks! One question though - how do you report a competitor that is spamming? I don’t know if i would, sounds a bit catty, but just in case the gloves come off…!
Lol.. you need to add “do-follow” forums. However a link is better than a none. I would also suggest you to use Yahoo siteexplorer. Thats a lot better with the SEOquake plugin to see the PR and details
Other options would use pr sites like http://www.pr-checker.net which is fast and easy
Good content of article and idea about the SEO campaign what should a webmaster start doing in the SEO services, link exchange and directory submission are very appropriate at the starting time of SEO.