Strategic Link Building

What is strategic Link Building?  I define it as the art of acquiring links that will get you ranked above your competitors (all other things being equal).

Lets say you own a widgets site called Widgets4U.com and your competitor owns a competing site called MoreWidgets.com, how can you go about discovering which links your competitor has acquired?

Very simple.  Yahoo has created a webmaster resource called Yahoo Site Explorer which lets you discover many things about a site including information about all the backlinks pointing towards it.

So to get started, visit site explorer and type in your competitor’s domain name in the search box, then  and click on the “Explore URL” button. 

By default this will give you all of the pages indexed by Yahoo for your competitor.  If you click on the “inlinks” link at the top of the results, this will show you all the links pointing to your competitor’s site.

The list of links you get however will include all your competitor’s links including the internal links pointing only to the home page.   

So to get a more targeted list, choose from the drop down menus “Except from this domain” and to “Entire Site”.  This will give you a list of all your competitors outbound links pointing to anywhere on their site.

Once you have this strategic list of competitor links, you can go about contacting the site owners to acquire the same or equivalent links to boost your link popularity score with Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the other search engines. 

And this, in a nutshell, is what strategic link building is all about.