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Hi Dana,

Thanks a lot for your great advice! I will follow all your 3 advices and start to create some really useful content for natural link building, our competitors are not strong, I believe we have a good chance of catching up them in half year or 1 year.

Thanks again for the help!

Tian Jie

Hi everyone,

We are a small company manufacturing a niche product (indoor playground equipment), our new English website (www.funlandiaplaygrounds.com) has just been launched 2 months ago, before that we didn't even have a website in English.

As the international sales manager of such a small company, I have to do all the international marketing jobs including SEO, but before this I'm almost a noob on SEO.

I've just started the linking building work for our website, after a research on the links of our highest ranked competitors, I have found out that almost ALL of the external links of them come from directories and purchased links, many links are very dubious, please see the open explorer results below:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.spiplay.co.uk&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.softplay.com%2F

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=www.china-cheer.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=&target=page&group=1

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aileplay.com%2F

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=internationalplayco.com%2F

The search keywords is: indoor playground equipment.

According to the latest SEO theory and numerous posts I've read here, links from these directories carry very low value, and solely relying on these links may even cause penalty to the website, but the reality is, all these competitors rank on the top as a result of these "spammy" links.

For example this website www.aileplay.com that has the highest PA of 64 and rank on the first page on the search result of indoor playground equipment, has tons of spammy links.

That is the situation we are facing now, then my questions is:

As a small business in such a niche market, what is our best strategy to rank well in a reasonable time, say 3 months to 6 months?

I do not think our competitors are very strong and hard to beat, I believe we will beat them in content creation for sure, but what should we do in link building? should we start to get directory links now, as it obviously works for them?

Or should we first create more attractive content, then use these content to get natural links BEFORE we submit for directory, as recommended by most link experts here? If so should we just sit back doing nothing before the link worthy content is created and natural links starts to come in?

I highly appreciate any comments!

DSG_clan