The first thing you need to do when trying to find and acquire good incoming links is to check out your top online competition’s incoming links. Your competitors may rank above you for many different reasons other than having good quality links. You should thoroughly check them out anyway just in case.

Quality incoming links is a big deal to Google for determining your ranking value. For this reason, you should make a list of all of your top online competition’s incoming links, evaluate them yourself and decide if you want to try to get incoming links from these sites. The search engines will tell you your competition’s back-links.

Backlinks are all the websites pointing to a specific web page. Google has Google’s link query and Yahoo has Yahoo’s link domain query.

After you create a list of possible linking partners, you need to evaluate each one on its own merits. You may be surprised by how many links your top competitors link to that are not that relevant. You can use that information to your advantage as well.

Google only offers a small sampling of backlinks to a particular website. Even so, there is discussion among SEO professional that these are most likely the best of the links.