Before embarking on a link building programme for any client preparation is vital. Part of that preparation will be competitor research and part will be keyword research.

If you are engaged in a link building programme for someone else then it is essential you have a good relationship with them and ask as many questions as you can to build up a good picture of their marketplace and competitors.

Among the most important questions you can ask will be naming the companies competitors and the keywords that they want to rank for. You should not assume the competitors are the same for all the keywords you want to compete for. It is a good idea to research the backlinks of industry competitors as well as keyword competitors.

There are a number of different tools for checking backlinks to a particular URL. I use Yahoo Site Explorer most often. You enter the URL you would like to look at and select ‘inlinks’ and then ‘show inlinks except from this domain’ and it will return the results you are looking for. It is very simple.

Trying to add a bit of value to a link request is something that will help when contacting webmasters and should mean a higher success rate in link acquisition. You should be targeting sites where a link to yours can add something to the user experience but that may not always be enough to encourage a webmaster to go to the trouble of editing their page for you.

One technique that can be used to try and gain links is to run a quick check on their site with Firefox’s check page links tool. It allows you to see if there are any broken links on the page and to let the webmaster know if there are. It doesn’t take long but really can encourage someone to do you a favour if you are doing one for them already.

This technique is particularly of use if you are trying to obtain a link from high authority sites like ac.uk or .gov sites because the people in charge of them are unlikely to have much time to audit links, and are likely to appreciate it if others do a little leg work for them.

Link building is a key part of any overall SEO project. Please get in touch if you would like any advice on internet marketing.