When it comes to putting together a sound link building strategy, any plan you make should first start with a link audit. A link audit is a handy little practice you can put into use that will easily tell you exactly where your website or blog stands in terms of current external links – and once you know exactly what your links currently look like, you not only know where you need to put in some more work, but you also have a base line to measure your future link building progress against.

Performing a link audit is pretty simple, but it can get time consuming, depending on your site’s popularity and traffic. To do it, all you need is the link feature found in the free Google Webmaster Tools. It will provide you with a full list of all of the sites linking back to yours, which you can then sort through. If your site is new and you haven’t been actively participating in any link building activities, then you probably won’t have many incoming links on your list yet – that’s okay, because the audit is still giving you a base line to work from and measure your progress against when you DO start link building activities.

Regardless of the number of links in your list, you will still need to manually check each and every one of them to determine what KIND of link it is (which is why I said it can get time consuming – so if you don’t want to do it yourself, hire someone to do it for you). Search engines like you best when you have a variety of links, so the ideal is to have them coming from all different sources – websites, blogs, directories, articles, press releases, etc. Once you know what kind of links you’ve got, you can then work on getting more in the areas that are lagging behind.

After the initial audit, it’s a good idea to conduct them at regular intervals thereafter. When you compare the new link audit data to the old, you’ll have a great way to easily see how well your site is doing in the link building arena.