Getting links to your website

Traffic, as well as good Search Engine Ranking, is obtained by performing on-site and off-site SEO. On-site optimization is about optimizing the content of your web page, make it accessible to the search engines, using the right keywords, etc. All those factors can be controlled by you.

On the other hand, off-page optimization is something you cannot control, at least directly. It's not surprise that link building was voted as the most challenging task among SEOs in a survey conducted by SEOmoz recently. In that survey, Link Building and Off-page optimization were, hands down the most difficult part of SEO.

However, you can use professional SEO advice and tips to get valuable links to your site and make the link building phase easier:

The first technique I'd like to talk about is called Examining Competitors: This is a basic, but quite effective technique. Let's say that I want to acquire links to my company site (http://www.unlimitedwebdesigns.com) and that I want to use the keyword "Miami SEO".

The first step, would be to perform a Google search using the desired keyword I'd like to be ranking for. The websites returned would be the ones that Google recognizes as the most relevant and important for that keyword. You would like to check if there are opportunities to get a link from those websites. Visit each of the top 10 websites and check if you can somehow get a link from their website.

Next, you will check who is linking to your competitor's website. Always asking "How could they get this link, and how can I get it too?" Or something like that, I think you get the idea. The premise is to obtain those links that are making your competitor rank higher in the search engines for your desired  keyword. You will be using yahoo as the tool to check the list of your competitor's incoming links.

Perform the following search in Yahoo: linkdomain:www.mycompetitorswebsite.com

This shows you the majority of websites that link to this competitor, start visiting those sites and keep looking for backlinks opportunities. Find where is the link pointing to your competitor's website and find the way to obtain a similar link for YOUR website.

You'll find that using this simple technique, you will have a huge list of possible incoming links to your website.