One area that website owners often seem to grapple with, while envisaging a search engine optimization plan, is a solid and consistent link building plan. It often proves to be quite a tricky job even for most experienced search consultants. Usually it makes sense to let the clients pursue their own link building goals based on domain expertise and insight they have at their disposal.

Let us now follow some basic aspects of a link building exercise

Establish your site’s USP: First and foremost, it is vital to grasp what exactly is your USP. While doing so, don’t merely look at the site to try and list the USPs. There’s a major difference between the USPs you spot on a site and those you will find in a business as a whole. The key is to get inside a company’s business model and grasp its finer aspects as well as strengths.

Once you are able to establish its USP and mark the areas where it stands apart from your competitors, the job of link building becomes that much easier. In fact, this is the crucial stage where a site owner identifies a focal point for seeking quality links.

Following are the ways to unravel USPs of your site or business as a whole:

• Well-connected employees can provide with valuable contacts to key business associates. The latter, in turn, may help get in touch with website editors; request suppliers to provide a link from their site; and also perhaps spot good guest blogging opportunities.
• An E-Commerce site can be used as a platform to provide information about spare stock to seek mutually beneficial links. Professional bloggers, industry experts and even regular customers may be asked to post reviews – to create a buzz about your business.
• To build further goodwill and attain quality links, you may opt to support a charity or perhaps any popular sports team from whose website you can ensure a link back to your site, in return.
• Discount vouchers can be used for getting links. This will keep potential customers happy and bring more traffic to your site.
• Email Lists can act as a perfect link building bargaining chip. How about offering your target site owners a special coverage in your periodic newsletter? On the one hand, they will gain from greater exposure to a loyal user base. On the other hand, you will get the one-way link that you want.
• Just similar to email lists, external Web Properties like microsites can be employed as bargaining tools to give people exposure sans linking to them from your website directly. This can work perfectly if you’ve control of pages that are not domains you own like Twitter pages, Facebook business pages or even those on content platforms (Hubpages, for instance).