One of the most powerful aspects of Search Engine Optimization is link building. Proper link building for the purpose of rankings uses Targeting Links. Targeting Links are one of the most effective approaches, as the links pass PageRank, and are already proven to rank your competitors. The 'Old School' terminology for this approach is called 'Stealing your competitors rankings'.

Top SEO Companies use this method when developing top-tier marketing strategies for their clients and even their own websites. It is also the most time consuming approach to link building, but it is one of the most powerful methods of producing results.

Define your keyword targets: Each and every link you build needs to have a keyword target when using this approach. Target a single keyword first. See who's ranking in the top ten on your favorite Search Engine (SE) for this keyword or keyword phrase. All of those sites contain your link targets. The sites that link to them, their backlinks, are more powerful than any link that is built for the sole purpose of link popularity. These are targeted links and have much more power to rank websites. Now the keyword that these sites rank for is the Anchor Text that you want to use on your link on these targeted websites.

Now that we have your keyword target, we need to consider whether the link is really a quality link, or a spam site. Determining this is harder for the layman than the experienced marketer as some sites that show in the backlinks are obvious spammers or websites that are trying to make a buck from Pay Per Click advertising. As a general rule these have low or no PageRank (PageRank 0/10), and always have a ton of ads first. Ignore these links, as they will be temporary or detrimental to this process. Finding the quality websites in your competitors backlinks is very important. You need to weed out the garbage.

Choose the websites that have some PageRank and appear to be quality sites, if you find some sites in common when checking backlinks on multiple competitors, then those are the important links, and you should do whatever you have to do to get a link from it. Consider a reciprocal if all else fails.

Now the hard part, how do you get your link on their page next to your competitor? How can you get the link to you without returning it? Since everyone is so link popularity aware, you need to present a quality proposal to the webmaster to gain a link. You need to be a quality addition for the webmaster to want to add the link. Nowadays, it's rare that any site will give a link without returning one. In 1999 before the Link Popularity Search Engines, this was not the case, webmasters linked to whoever they wanted to and paid no attention to reciprocal link exchanges. So how can we get a link without returning one?

Here's a smart approach. For any link that you are targeting, you really need to try and attempt to offer the webmaster a real reason on why he should add the link. Proving that your website is a valuable resource and one-of-a-kind, is a possible way to still get a free link, and a free targeted link is a powerful link. One-way links are important for any site as it is the model of the Authority Domains. These sites have hundreds to thousands of one-way links, and very few if any reciprocal links. So you should try through whatever methods of one-way link building that you want to use, to get these targeted links without reciprocating. But a reciprocal link is better than no link.

Combine this method with blind link building (random reciprocals links), press releases and even article writing (like this one) and your site will achieve better rankings, better traffic and if your site is truly effective'it will prosper.