High Value Link Building: What to Do and More Importantly, What Not To?

On the chart of a website promotional plan, link building (read high value link building) comes second to no other strategy. Long term success to your website is relative to the value of the backlinks you obtain from reputed websites, but then the big question- how do you actually go about obtaining these links?

What to do to obtain high value links?

• Set the right targets: You can’t just blindly aim at the clouds, but if you aim accurately and wisely, you might very well shoot the stars down! Setting the right targets needs lot of research work to be done beforehand. You need to know your current position and you should envisage a futuristic position for yourself too. Say, if your competitor has a dozen of ‘high-on-value’ links from reputed sites, you can’t just catch forty winks after you’ve fetched a couple of equally valuable links. You need a couple of dozens, don’t you? So, plan wisely and have a more subjective definition of your ‘targets’.
• Recognize the authorities or reputed sites: This is not going to be simple and advice from other peers on this matter

can be of great help. Here are, few possible consideration:

1. Leading authorities in your space: Lookout for companies, not necessarily your competitors, but other respectable independent authorities in your space.
2. Backlink competitors: Target the domains with the highest pagerank linked to them.
3. Media: Columnists/ eminent media persons anyone near you in the cyber space?
   

• Content strategy: Plan out a content strategy once you’ve found out your targets. Devise a more individual or target-specific strategy. What would attract them or interest them in your website? Obviously, they aren’t going to link your website if you are of no use to them or their users! The content strategy or plan will be dependent on your goals or targets and the diversity of the authorities you are intending to pursue. Assemble your best cards together and play them rightly, something similar to a marketing tool package should get you there.
• Finally, the contact content: Again, be more target-specific. Let them know you have been through their website with utmost concern and you really want yourself linked with them. Be as creative as possible and expressive. Remember, this is the beginning of what might possibly be a long term relationship (a profitable one).
  

What not to do?

• Do not buy in the easily available spam links or do not link yourself to such websites either (it might result in the downfall of your Pageranks). A single link from a reputed website is a hundredfold worthier than 1000 of spam links (too much of numbers, huh?)
• Do not generate mass emails to all the target websites, no matter how good you are in camouflaging them as customized ones. Talk one-to-one for better relationships (I know this doesn’t quite work after marriage though!).