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Ask yourself, why are there so many wannabes in the SEO industry and why do they appear to be a brainless army of zombies dwelling in the realm of repetitive and low value activity.

Think about all the blog commenting, forum signatures, cheap and fluffy article distribution, countless  directories and paid reviews. The answer could be in the fact that a lot of these processes seem very easy to replicate.

Let’s look at online directories. There used to be a few, fairly well moderated, carrying a reasonable link value. Naturally some genius thought –

‘ Hey, why don’t we make more directories and give ourselves more links!? ‘

Soon after that, link directories were popping up like mushrooms after rain. What did search engines do next? Devalue! Great. Thanks guys.

The above mentioned scenario replicated in countless other cases, and all of them exhibited one common element – they were easy to do, and easy to replicate.

Let’s face it, there is no long-term shortcut to easy SEO results. Instead, we can hope occasionally catch a wave of a new strategy that search engines have not caught on yet, or we can choose to do it the other way – the hard way. The reason this strategy is worth adopting is the fact that people are lazy and only true professionals will bother with hard work and high quality. By eliminating about a ninety percent of spammers leaves us with true SEO professionals. Wouldn’t you want to belong to that category? The crop of the cream!

What is involved with creative link building?

1. Brain. Those creative cells in your brain will have to spark up and you will have to invent a new solution for every new client, scenario or situation.
2. Uniqueness. You cannot afford to think in the way of automation, replication, there can be no shortcuts. Think about the unique approach for each webmaster or content manager you are about to approach.
3. Personalization. Connect to people you wish to get links from on a personal level and try to understand what they do, what their motivations are for publishing content online. A retired general will not be interested in a $100.00 per link per month deal, but he might give it to you for free if he knows you’ve read his book or donated to the charity he is a member of.
4. Time. You will have to spend time getting that link, there is just no way around it. Be prepared to carefully plan your approach and execute it in an appropriate fashion. Your clients will push you for rankings, but you cannot push a webmaster for a link.
5. Contribute. Be generous, get involved, help and give without asking for anything in return. People will recognise your efforts and offer to assist you on their own, try to find a solution that will compliment both your efforts and their content or mission.

These are just a few key elements that characterize a unique link building strategy and all of them result in contributing to the quality of the web content. Not all links are difficult to get this way, at Dejan SEO we’ve been using these methods to stay ahead of the competition and it has paid off.

It’s not only our clients who benefit here but also our staff who are able to bypass the monotony of link building and enjoy their daily tasks knowing that every next day brings a new challenge.

Please comment on this post by sharing your creative building strategy or experience with other readers. Share this post http://bit.ly/TJV6g

This is a Li’l Engine guest post by Dejan Petrovic of Dejan SEO – Follow Dejan on Twitter if you like to get more tips on link building strategies.

Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?

Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.

In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.

Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.

Case Scenario

My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.

Google Alerts

Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.

Google Alerts

This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;

• Google News
• Blogs
• Web Search results ( new SERPs )
• Videos
• Google Groups

Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.

Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.

• Campaign A for their brand name Super-Clear-A-Face.
• Campaign B for product related keywords : Acne Cream, acne treatment cream, pimple removal cream, acne gel.
• Campaign C for treatment , symptoms related keywords : Acne treatment, rid acne, cure acne, acne medication

Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases

Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.

Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.

I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.

You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.

If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.

I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.

As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )

In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.

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