Strategic Link Building & Competitive Intelligence

Link building is an essential component of search engine optimization. But how do you go about it? In this post we'll discuss what strategic link building really means, as well as how to identify link opportunities that can be pursued. We’ll also cover the importance of competitive intelligence and how you can gather intelligence on your competition for a competitive advantage.

In order to achive success in SEO, you need to have both strong organic search results and external links pointing back at those pages. To rank higher in the SERPS, sites need good on-page SEO combined with high quality backlinks from other sites pushing relevant traffic towards them – i.e. getting them natural traffic from other websites.

The problem with link building is that it is a challenge to define precisely and put into practice. With most search engine optimization agencies, you'll get some kind of a list of links, most likely nothing more than a few pages with some kind of content and/or images on them that are randomly selected from another site. While it's important to build some backlinks for SEO purposes, those links will still have no value if they do not have any direct impact on your rankings in the SERPS ­­– unless they are deliberately spammy.

Search engines try to avoid backlinks that have no authority or value. Getting a link from an information-rich website will have more impact than getting a link from a page with little or no original content on it. Success in link building depends on the quality of the backlink as well as content and design quality of your own website. It is important to know when to drop backlink-building tactics and focus on strategies that bring in effective, natural search traffic.

Strategic Link Building Broadly Defined & Its Importance for SEO

So what does strategic link building mean? Essentially, it's about "building links that are purposeful, relevant and authoritative. And that is not just about backlinking – it's also about creating content on your own site that draws people in and gives them something to share that makes it worth linking to."

If you have a blog or some kind of content on your website, you should make sure to create something unique and valuable for SEO purposes. You can either create an original piece of content or go the easier route and use existing material and provide some value to it by adding new information. For example, if you find some article with a topic relevant to what you do, you can add some information personally and link back to the original source. The key here is to find information that people value and make it your own.

That's what is called "link building" – creating links back to your site that add value. It doesn't always have to be linked internally, of course – you can also go for things like referring a few relevant pages from another site to your own web page. This would help you gain more traffic and improve search engine rankings in general; the only thing missing is credibility.

Developing content on your own website is also an important part of link building, although it's not as simple as it sounds.

Conclusion

Strategic link building is essential to driving successful SEO and improving your search engine rankings. It's also important to pay attention to your competition and find ways of getting leverage over them. Competitive intelligence is another important skill that you need in order to succeed in SEO; you need to know how to identify the good links that will get you a lot of traffic from other sites, as well as those links that will get you penalized by search engines.

Knowledge is power when it comes to SEO, so if you want your site's user experience getting better, make sure to learn as much as possible about what the search engines like – and don't like – when it comes to backlinks and content quality.