**by Julie Joyce**
When you begin a link campaign, whether you've inherited one or
you're starting fresh, it's obviously a good idea to get a sense of
where things stand. There are tons of articles and tools out there
that exist to help you do this, and that's fantastic (and much nicer
than what we had a few years back.) The problem that I see with all of
this is the time that you can waste getting utterly bogged down with
your analysis.
You shouldn't immediately jump right into a link building campaign
without doing any research of course, but I also don't think that you
need to spend weeks and weeks producing spreadsheets that give you
very little direction at all, when your time would have been better
spent actually pursuing links.
As part of my New Year's resolutions, I'm going to do my very best to
become more efficient in every aspect of my business, and to slow down
in my personal life and enjoy my children before the day comes when
they won't be seen with me at the mall. Hence, here is my quick and
dirty step by step approach for analyzing your backlink profile
whether you're taking on a new campaign or simply reevaluating where
you are with a current one.
1. Analyze what's there currently. Use whatever tool(s) you like, but
make sure you get an accurate idea of where you stand. Major things to
look at include how many backlinks the site has, the distribution of
anchor text, how many links are nofollowed, and your link growth
<http://www.majesticseo.com/comparedomainbacklinkhistory.php>
.
2. Analyze the backlink data for a few competitors and see where you
stand in relation to them.
3. Sketch out an idea of where you'd like to be in 6 months. What are
your goals? Unreasonable or not, lay them out. You can narrow them
down in the next form of analysis. (see step 8 below)
4. Compare your goals to your existing setup. Which ones are you
close to meeting? Which ones will need a serious amount of work to
meet? List them in order so that you can immediately see which can be
met quickly, and which need a more long-term strategy to meet.
5. Identify any problem areas. Whether it's a 95% anchor text
reliance upon your url, a total lack of inbound links for your most
critical keywords, or anything else that stands out, note it and
figure out how you're going to tackle it. If you see loads of link
spikes
<http://searchengineland.com/why-you-should-care-about-link-spikes-21852>
in your backlink history, try to track them down and figure out why
they occurred (press release, major news topic, linkbait, etc.)
Now that you have some basic information about your backlink profile
and a few of your competitors, you can do some further analysis:
6. Look for common threads and general themes that you all have.
7. Look for what they all have that you're missing. Figure out why
you don't have it, and whether or not you need it. If you and your
three competitors all have roughly the same number of backlinks and
you're ranking at number 93 while they're all in the top 5 for all the
major industry terms, it's time to dig deeper into the actual site,
and the other aspects of SEO.
8. Using this information and what you've gleaned from the initial
analysis (see step 3 above), make a plan of attack and set some
realistic goals for the next few months.
Now, as you may know, it's obviously not a good idea to try and
rectify something immediately by grabbing up hundreds of links when
you've historically been generating around 15 new inbound links a
month.
If you determine that your competitors all have 5000 links more than
you do right now, lay out a month by month guideline for how many
links you'd like to get each month, making sure that your goals are in
keeping with your historical backlink growth profile. If you've been
getting 10 new links a month, I wouldn't recommend making it a monthly
goal to try and get 400 links in the first month. You want to build up
slowly so that it looks natural. Just don't become paralyzed by your
analysis.
See? A more efficient post than I normally write! Well, at least it's
shorter than usual&
Happy holidays to everyone!
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Julie Joyce <http://searchengineland.com/author/julie-joyce/>
owns the link development firm Link Fish Media
<http://www.linkfishmedia.com/>
and is one of the founding members of the SEO Chicks
<http://www.seo-chicks.com/>
blog.
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