1. How many links do I currently have?

2. Where are those links coming from? Directories? Random blog posts? Educational sites?

3. Who am I looking to target? Coming up with two or three personas can be very helpful.

4. What is my brand position? How do I want the public to see my site / company?

5. What are my business goals?

6. How will I define success?

7. How will I measure statistics to determine if I have achieved that level of success?

8. What resources do I currently have to work with.

Obviously, the answers to these questions will indicate a number of things in terms of your link building campaign. Your audience will determine where you are looking to get links from. Your brand indicates what caliber of sites you are looking at and what, specifically, you will be saying on those sites. The amount of resources will determine what you can do now and what you will have to build up to.  Defining your analytics can help tie in a whole other group of individuals, or spur you into learning how to use the analytics you already have running on your site.

Of course, these are not all the questions you should ask when starting, but this is definitely a list of “must-asks” and it will open the door to all those other things that you need to learn about your company or site and how it will apply to your link building and overall SEO efforts.

Text links are obviously the way to go. If a .gov site has your logo as the link, ask if they are willing change it to a text link with keyword rich anchor text. Again, reaching out and establishing a sound relationship with webmasters of .gov sites will prove to be very beneficial in the long run, so this first contact should be courteous and to the point. You do not want them to feel as though they are wasting their time talking to you. If they say no, thank them for their response and start researching ways that you can add value to their site.

Use SEO for Firefox to download the .gov links currently pointing to your site and evaluate them one by one. Prioritize according to what links are broken and need fixed immediately and the rest by PageRank and relevancy. Keep track of progress and who you talk to at each site. Personal communication will go a long way when it comes to your reclamation efforts.

The task of link reclamation can be very tedious. There’s no doubt about that. Finding the right tool to download your links, analyzing your anchor text and doing a breakdown of links per page can seem to be a daunting task. But with the right tools and a well thought out plan of attack, it’s not as bad as it seems.

Use SEO for Firefox to find your .edu links and go over those first. Sites that have a .edu extension are (obviously) all about education. Their web sites are meant to be useful, helpful, and chock full of information for their users. So go into each site and check the following items:

1. Where does the link go? Make sure the link works first and foremost. Determine what page it’s intended to go to and make sure there are no errors involved with it. If it is broken, either fix the page or get a hold of the webmaster and ask them to link to another appropriate page. This is vital. If you ask them to link to a page that you desperately need links to, but it’s irrelevant to what they’re doing, you might lose a .edu link all together.

2. What does the anchor text say? Does it target the keywords that you are focusing on for the URL destination? If not, you can always contact them and say that you need a slight change made to the anchor text. Generally, webmasters are more than willing to do this so long as they have the time.

3. Keep the conversation going. Are there other pages on the .edu site that are relevant to your site’s content? Perhaps more links can be generated. Following up an edit in anchor text with a thank you note or general conversation is always nice. Sometimes, the webmaster enjoys the appreciation (we all know how time-consuming it is to maintain a web site these days). There are those times that the attitude of “I fixed your link, leave me alone” comes across, but that’s okay. Move on. Don’t waste time cultivating relationships with webmasters that aren’t interested. Instead, focus your efforts where you will get the most bang for your buck.

Next, we’ll talk about .gov link reclamation. Until then…

Why link? Because without it, the flow of knowledge can stop. The stories of old are legends today due to the ever sharing of knowledge and information with a newer generation. From the stories of Japanese fighting warriors to Grandpa’s infamous three point shot, these stories have been retold and translated countless times, keeping them alive in the realm of infamy.

Why link? Because the sum of the whole is always greater than the parts. The internet provides a glimpse (I mean simply that… a glimpse) of the wealth of knowledge that is available on any subject that crosses cultures, countries, industries, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The internet becomes more valuable as more users add to it.

So take a chance and link to something. What are you limking to today? Better yet, who is linking to you?