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Hi Matthew!

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Nicole

One of the more advanced (ie difficult to outsource) but highly effective strategies is to offset the links your competitors have.

1. Go to OpenSiteExplorer.com or MajesticSEO or any other software such as SEOSpyglass, Market Samurai, and run a backlink report of your top 5-10 competitors.

2. Organize the results by Domain Authority OR Page Authority OR AC rank OR Page Rank... and make a short list of 100-200 links.

3. Most of the links might be blog comments, or forum profile links or guest blog posts... some closed blog networks.. go after the easy ones first and then get as many as the hard ones as you can.

4. Re-run the reports with another keyword to get more competitors to reverse engineer.

5. Repeat.

Nicole

Run your site in OpenSiteExplorer.com and also run your top 5 competitors.  To find your top 5 competitors, do a search in Google for your main keyword.. the top 5 sites are your top 5 competitors. Be sure you are logged out of your google account when you do the search.

Create an excel file that maps the domain authority, page authority, total links, and links from unique domains.  If your numbers are less than any of your competitors, you have more work to do.

If you lack in domain or page authority, you need more high quality links.

If you lack in number of links from different domains... you need more links from many more sites.

If you lack in total number of links... you just need a whole lot more links.

Once your numbers outrank your competitors in terms of authority and links, if you still don't outrank them, then you need to look at on-site stuff.

This is a ROUGH overview and an easy way for a beginner to start work asap.  What we do is a little more complex but we can save that for another day!

Nicole

Here are some ideas!

1. Each Press Release re-written for on-site content also. The distributed press release can also summerize a deeper quality article placed on the clients site.  So... they get a topic... write an awesome article for on-site content, write a summary piece for a press release that links to the on-site content. The social media team links to both the press release and the on-site content to get it indexed and create buzz. Teach the social media team to ask questions like.. what do you think about this... to engage the audience.  They should not just be saying.. go check this out.  The on-site content should also be on a blog platform to encourage comments and participation.

2. PR team should look for local opportunities for your client to participate or sponsor.  If your client can sponsor a local event, most have a website and one of the requirements for the sponsorship should be an SEO friendly link back to the site.  This all ties into the Press Release strategy above. You can do a write up on the site about the sponsorship then a press release about it and so on.

3. The PR team could be tasked with reputation management and owning your brand in the space.  They should go out and register yourname.wordpress.com for example and post some basic content on it for reputation management.  You want them to take preventive measures so that if someone does come out with something negative about your client, you have a network of sites you can quickly build links to to push up in the results to push the negative stuff down.  Posting the press releases etc on the network of sites could also fall to the PR team.

Hope that helps!

Nicole

I agree... great answer and very helpful!

Another vote for Smartdraw!

I agree.  Let Google decide unless you need to target a specific country.

SEO Spyglass does!  You can run a report on your own site, get the backlinks then run a more detailed report and choose the option to see if they link back to you.

Raventools also has this feature.  You can add your known links to Raven tools and then monitor them.  If someone stops linking back to you, you will be automatically notified.

Nicole