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I have always found that link building quality links is one of the most time consuming tasks that can be done when implementing an SEO strategy. There is the whole discussion about which links you should obtain and at what speed they should be sought and Arron Wall over at SEOBook.com has a great post today about the Link Growth Profiles that adds even more to the mix.

An element of Arron’s article (regards the geometric link build) conjures up thoughts of the fabled 200+ signals that Google says their algorithm looks for — notably a subset of Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) caught my train of thought. With the proliferation of blogs that are created and crafted purposefully to obtain rank advantage for a site it begs to ask that there must also exist, along with QDF a suite of dampening levers to ensure that only sites that pass those filters truly benefit from so called freshness.

Anyway, moving on as I got sidetracked there. I have always found it quite helpful when it comes to addressing the link building task to commit to a period of thorough research of your market; the image of the search results landscape that your site will be competing within. This is going to be composed of your direct and indirect competitors along with highlighting potential commercial opportunities for you. Typically you create this image (or graph) as a follow on task to your keyword research.

Steps to produce the Competitive Focus Graph:

1. Undertake your keyword research
2. Use a tool such as Advanced Web Ranking to scoure the main search engines for the top 40 results against each of your target keyword phrases and produce a CSV version of the Top Sites report.
3. Import the extracted CSV data from Advanced Web Ranking into Excel into a new Workbook and call it ‘Competitive Research’. You should have a number of columns of data in this sheet if everything went well.
4. Advanced Web Ranking exports the Full URI, so you will need to create a copy of this column data and run the new column called ‘Domain Name’. I have found it best to do this at the end of the data set so that when I run the Text To Columns tool (deliminator of /) my ranking data is not overwritten ;-0
5. Name your data sheet ‘Data’ and add some columns to this Excel sheet called ‘Competitor’, ‘In-Direct’ and ‘Opportunity’.
6. Select all of the data in your ‘Data’ sheet and sort it on your new ‘Domain Name’ column.
7. Manually filter through the data and mark each of the rows in your newly created columns with an x if it is a competitor, in-direct competitor (newspapers, portals, blogs, government sites) or opportunity (if it is a directory site, ebay, amazon, affiliate, or other potential commercial opportunity).
8. Create an Excel pivot table on this data sheet and apply thresholds (auto-filters to limit the data that you are looking at) on the SUM of the top 10 results across all your checked keywords and keyword phrases against the domain level of the data that you have extracted.
9. You now have the basis of data to understand where and who your search landscape competitors are and importantly where they are getting ranking traction from (assuming that you are filtering also on keyword concept areas).

Now that you have this new understanding of competitors you have a lot of power in focusing your efforts on those competitors that are worthwhile to uncover where they are getting their inbound links and also making an analysis of their on-page/on-site optimisation tactics.

Link Assistant is a fantastic tool that I use to understand where a competitor is getting their links from. SEOmoz also has a great tool, LinkScape, that allows you to enter in a competitors domain and export upto 3,000 of their inbound link partners.

Both of these tools provide you with tutorials on how to assess which links are those that are potentially valuable for your own optimisation efforts so I will not repeat that in this post. As with anything, there are many ways to do this task and folks develop preferences for one tool of another. I encourage you to go ahead and look at the tutorials and try their tools before committing to purchase and adding them to your SEO tool-belt.