Getting links…

There’s no way out. To rank in the majors search engines, a website need links. Depending of the market you’re dealing with, you might need lots of links. And quality links. In an ideal world, great content would bring great links. In real life though, lots of work are required to get those juicy links.

And as written by Mark Lus of RedFlyMarketing on the SEO ROI blog of Gabriel Goldenberg, most people do not like doing Link Building for 2 major reasons (excerpt from the “Cicero and Link Building” post):
1. The best quality links in terms of SEO value are tedious to obtain and involve the traditional research-and-request model. Aka link begging.
2. Even if you do everything right, you might still not get a response for a multitude of reasons, going from stale contact information to derelict sites so old they’re grown over with ivy.

One of my preferred link building method is to get a list of the links from the competitors, and trying to some of these links. To do this, I use the Linkscape tool of SEOmoz. If you’re looking for a free product though, I would recommend the Open Site Explorer (another SEOmoz product). The Yahoo Site Explorer also does a good job.