5 Million Links?

[SEOguppie]

Hi all,

I've been hired as the chief marketer at a (very) high traffic web company. Ironically, I don't have much SEO experience but I have been able to figure out PPC, on-page SEO and SEO content generation pretty well over the last few months.

What I don't get is link building. My question is this; we're trying to move from the 3-4 SERP slot to the 1-2 SERP slot for a short list of keywords. My boss asked me to get busy with link building. Our competitor has over 2 million external links and we have roughly 60 thousand. What do I do? How do I start? Is there a legit, white hat way to get this job moving?

Any insights would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[SEOguppie]

Absolutely. Our primary competitor to the top SERPs is www.forumotion.com.

Thanks,

Lary

[Resultify]

Hi again Lary

May I ask for the domain of your competitor?

Fredrik

[SEOguppie]

Fredrik,

Thanks for the awesome response, very helpful. I have another concern that I'm not sure how to approach; my competitor literally has over 2 million external links and we only have 60,000. How do I compete? How do i catch up? Did he  do it legally? The panda/penguin updates don't seem to have affected him at all.

Thanks again!

Lary

[Resultify]

Hi

Your boss is right, building links is a very important task. But, as you hint at yourself, its all about doing it the correct way. So asking the community before getting started was a smart move.

I have had many clients that could not resist the temptation of buying low quality links. A few months later they are all paying the price of this by being penalised by Google. So before we get started, stay clear of buying low quality or any links for that matter.

My first move is always to identify a few competitors and see what kind of links they are getting. Chances are that if they can get links this way so can you. For this http://www.opensiteexplorer.org is a great tool. To get an instant overview what links your competitors have use these settings:

Show: followed and 301s
Links from: only external
To: pages on this root domain

This would now give you a good list of links to your competitor. Sort the list by page authority and start investigating their most valuable links.

Further ideas to how to get links could be:

• Write for other blogs, and become a regular contributor
• Create stunning content that people want to link to
• Interview someone influential

For more useful information on to proceed with links please see these resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/eight-link-building-tips-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Hope this is enough to get started.

Good luck and may the linkbuilding force be with you

Fredrik