The greatest supplier of valuable information for you will be your competitors themselves. Once you have determined exactly who your competitors are it will be to your benefit to collect as much information as you can about their web presence and where they stand with the search engines. This includes their rankings, keywords they have and how they use them, advertisers they use, press releases and employment opportunities, product information, ordering and mission statements.

Look at your competitor’s backlinks for keywords or phrases they’re ranking highly for. Pay attention to how they’re using the keywords on their site and the frequency that they’re using them.

For your own site, notice what anchor text is being used in your backlinks. While it’s out of your control what anchor text someone uses on their pages, the anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results so utilize that information to your benefit.

You can also increase your likelihood of building backlinks by posting all types of relative information on your website or blog that may be of interest to others. By embedding links within this content on your own site, you’ll continue to be building backlinks as the content gets syndicated on other sites across the web, carrying with it your links back to your own site.

The best way to start the process of link building is to first get your business known through utilizing social networking sites. Get a general company profile posted anywhere you can with links back to your site.

In general, the links coming from within your own industry will hold more value than links coming from an unrelated business or some remote link farm. The days of setting up a page of nothing but links on your website are long gone and what used to be a tactic to benefit you can now work against you. It takes time and research to establish effective link building that will improve your search results with Google. There are no shortcuts here.

One of the best link building tactics yet is using piggyback links. If you’re unable to obtain a link from a high ranking authority site then try securing links from the sites that link to that site.

The many avenues of social media are an excellent source for locating like-minded people and businesses from which to base your link building campaign. Sharing links with reputable industry leaders and lead players provide you with the most value when it comes to scoring high in Google’s search results.

Through social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Delicious, Facebook, Klout, Google+ and LinkedIn, among many others, you can locate the leaders of the industries as well as any topics you are interested in. You’ll have the most success with establishing solid relationships for social media link building if you already are (or appear to be) well embedded in the industry. For example, it’s helpful to have your user name and email address be related to the industry you’re wanting to build relationships with.

It’s also through these same social networking sites where you’ll find your audience of followers interested in whatever it is you have to offer. You’re able to find them through searches and it’s easy to catch their attention when you use intriguing links to new and exciting information on your site.

Finding and establishing relationships with the industry leaders and followers takes time and a bit of research but it’s the path to your strongest and most successful social media link building yet and it’s time well spent.

Link building for Mobile SEO is different than for primary websites as there is less descriptive content to build links off of. Navigation links are abbreviated and more generalized to take up less space on mobile devices but search engine performance improves the more information you give them. Because search engines will read more than just the content that is linked it’s more important than ever to provide robust descriptive links. For instance, while your mobile site might just list “Services” your Alt and Title descriptions could list the specific services you provide.

Copy links are the most advantageous method of link building for Mobile SEO. Surrounded by related content the links provide a wealth of information to search engines. SEO Best Practices state, for the most effective link building for Mobile SEO, frequently refer to information elsewhere on your site that you can link to, although search engines continue to place the greatest value on links that come from other websites.

In the early days of Google if you wanted a good placement in search results all you had to do was submit your website url to a number of key web directories and they, in turn, would populate hundreds and sometimes thousands of lesser known engines and other directories with that information. This proved to sometimes effective and some times not so much, but we all agreed it was pretty much all we could do to try to get our websites in a better position in search results.

While there are still many businesses advertising they will still submit your information to endless directories it’s no longer an effective means to achieve higher rankings. Leading search engines have come a long way in the process of how they prioritize search results and building relevant links into your web sites is more than a good idea these days – it’s necessary.

To further add to the complexity of the issue, the engines follow the belief that all links are not created equal. Search engines like Google have a ranking order among domains, placing educational institutions (.edu domains) among the highest due to the informative academic work they publish on their web sites. It will benefit you and your clients the most by having link backs from institutions.

An excellent way to participate in link building with schools or other relevant businesses could be by building a relationship with them through volunteerism and donations.  Being acknowledged on their web site as a donor, with a link back to your site, is a simple way to obtain that link and will have you donating to a good cause at the same time.

Whether it’s a school (.edu), an organization (.org) or another business (.com or .net) the concept of link building is the same, regardless of the business niche you’re in. Find a relevant target to be linked back from, then offer to support that company in some way. If they don’t already have one, recommend the importance of a adding an Acknowledgements or Donors page to their web site. When doing so ask for a link back to your site explaining how it will benefit them as well.

Keeping this in mind, it won’t be long before you begin to see the benefits of relevant link backs to your site as you quickly climb to a more prominent position in the search engine rankings.

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