It is very important to define a proper link building strategy before launching yourself into the daunting task that is link building. And because link building is such a tedious task, setting up a strategy right from the beginning will ease the process a lot. You can still get an SEO company to do the work for you though.

So you need to do a couple (or more) in order to get the right link building strategy.

First of all, you need to understand your marketplace. By that I simply mean that you need to identify which keywords or key phrases are driving most of the traffic to websites. Once you have identified those key phrases you also need to refine them so they are as relevant as possible to your business, but also the easiest to reach. If for example you are selling second hand mobile phones, there is no need to go after keywords like mobile phone, or buy mobile phone. It is nearly impossible to get a website top for those phrases unless you are willing to pay thousands over a couple of years. It would much better and easier to go after more specific phrases, and even better to had the location in them.

Once you have identified the keywords or key phrases you want to go after, you need to find out where you will want to get your back links, or inbound links from.

Will you only use directories so get back links, or will you go to forums, blogs posting comments or even creating blogs yourself. You could also find industry relevant websites and ask them for link. Anyway, there are plenty of methods to get inbound links and you absolutely need to identify them before starting doing link building.

Once you have started the link building, you have to keep in mind that fresh traffic will not come flowing into your website on day two. Link building takes time. It is a time consuming process and it is as well an ongoing process. It also depends on what was the position of your website on the search engines and the competition for those key phrases is.

It could only take you a couple of months to be in the top five if there is not much competition around a keyword.

As a result you need to monitor whether your link building campaign is bringing you any traffic at all. If you get top for a keyword but it does not bring any traffic, you need to refine quickly your strategy and go after different keywords.