Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis

Link Building Based on Competitive Analysis

Looking at the links obtained by your top competitors and pursuing methods of your own to get listed on those sites/pages is an excellent way to stay competitive in the link building race. It's also a good way to get natural traffic, as these are the links and sites that send your competitors their traffic, they will also bring visitors to your site. The methodology for investigating a competitor's links is fairly straightforward, although more complex methods can be used by the advanced researcher.

The best source of linkage data is Yahoo! Google purposely does not report accurate link data with their link: command and MSN's rankings of links can often show less valuable and effective links at the top. Yahoo!, however, currently shows the greatest accuracy in numbers of links, and also sorts well, typically placing more valuable links near the top of the results.

At Yahoo!, the following searches can be used to find pages that link to other sites/pages:

1. Link domain: url.com
   this command will show you all the pages that link to any page hosted at the domain url.com.


2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   this command will show only those pages which link directly to the specified page.


3. Link domain: url.com word
   this search will show all pages with the term "word" that link to pages hosted at the URL. You can use this to find topical linking pages that may be providing benefit for specific areas.


4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the - sign to indicate that pages which include a particular term should be excluded from the search, for example, searching for all links that point to a site that don't contain your company name on the page (i.e. linkdomain:seobook.com -seomoz). Note that searches can contain multiple - signs and terms if you require very specific information (or wish to exclude lots of noisy data).


5. Link domain: url.com -site: url.com
   In addition to the - sign as a term remover, you can remove sites from the results as well. This can be especially valuable if one large site links to the target site on every page, and you wish to see the links that don't include that site. It can also be valuable to remove the site itself, (i.e. link domain: seomoz.org -site:seomoz.org), so as not to see results from internal pages.

Competitive analysis also includes using the top search results themselves as sources for links. If a site or page ranks particularly well for many related searches, a link from that site can send a healthy number of interested surfers to you. Rankings in the SERPs is also an excellent way to determine the value of a link, so if a page ranks highly for the term or phrase you're targeting, a link from that page is sure to provide great assistance in your goal to achieve top placement.

Link Building Tips

Top 12 link building tips that I highly recommend you to use when starting to build your links.

1. Web Directories
Getting listed in DIRS is good for you, you get a lot of back links. I am posting here only high quality, free, human reviewed, PR6+ directories only ( BTW I checked the PR of the directories I am providing with Google Toolbar and I have to say that there is a big difference in their PR since the last update. I have seen many directories that have fallen from PR6 to PR0, I suppose they have used some black seo to get promoted and finally they lost their PR). The good thing about these dirs is that if you get your site listed you will get lots of traffic. The bad thing is that the review process of your site often is more than 3 months.

Of course there are more good high PR directories but I will leave the search for them to you. You can use Google to find some, but the lists that come on first page results shows the old PR of the directories. Don't get mad if you are not listed after 3 months from submission. Your time will come, don't give up!

2. Link Exchange
This is also good way to get back links. When contacting other webmasters write in personalized way. Tell them why you want to exchange links with them, introduce your site to them; tell them more about your site. Try to exchange links with only high quality sites with higher PR. You may find good partners to exchange links, the best way is contacting them in personal, or you may use some forums to find link exchange requests, and last but not least you may use some automated link exchange sites. Here are some of them:

Using these automated link exchange sites will also boost your back links and you will get many relevant links to your site. You can find much more sites like these but to be honest I think these ones will do a perfect job. You can always ask google about something like: 'free automated link exchange sites', 'free reciprocal programs', 'free link building programs' and some more search terms like these.

If you want first to check the page rank of the site you will be exchanging links with I recommend you to use:

http://www.digpagerank.com/ - In this site you can check the PR of a page or site in over 700 Google data centers

3. Article Submissions
Maybe I won't tell you something new but try to write good quality unique articles and post them to the best free article directories. This is one of the best way to do 2 things for your site: first get a lot of back links from the articles and second get a lot of traffic I hope you know that you have to put your keywords that you compete for in the anchor text which is very important for higher results in the SE's.

4. Press Release Submission
This method is something like writing articles and posts them almost everywhere. In fact using this tactic you have to write a press release about your site or a page from your site. The process is the same. You have to submit the press release to good press release distribution sites. Below is the list of the ones that I am using

5. Social Networking / Social Group Sites
Social networking sites are very useful these days not only to get links but also huge traffic. Participating in social group / networking sites are proving to give boost to your traffic these days. Here is my list:There are a lot more but I think these are enough; they are high quality and have a high PR (7+). They are perfect for getting good back links to your site.

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6. Getting link from .org, .gov and .edu sites
The education, organization and government sites are considered much more valued sites and links coming from those sites are valuable. You need to search and find such sites.

Do a simple search on Google with this search term:

hhttp://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Social+Media+Optimizer&btnG=Search

you may use another perfect search term special for edu blogs:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=EDU&btnG=Search

With this string you will get all .edu blogs that allow posting comments and do not require to be logged in. Hope you find this string perfect. You can experiment with it for all kind of domains, it's up to you. Make blog comments and put links in them, make sure your comment is genuine and not Spam. You have to read the whole topic and find something to comment on the topic… job is done. After doing some comments maybe in a week you will see in Goggle index that you have links from .edu domain or .gov

Attempt value of a link

Most important elements search engines look at when attempting to value a link:

• The Anchor Text of Link - Anchor text describes the visible characters and words that hyperlink to another document or location on the web. For example in the phrase, "IBNLive is a good source of news, but I actually prefer the IBN’s take on events," two unparallel pieces of anchor text exist - "IBN" is the anchor text pointing to http://www.ibnlive.com/news/ while "the IBN's take on news" points to http://www.ibnlive.com/news/ Search engines use this text to help them determine the subject matter of the linked-to document. In the example above, the links would tell the search engine that when users search for "IBN", we think that http://www.ibnlive.com /is a relevant site for the term "IBN" and that www.ibnlive.com and relevant to "the IBN's take on news". If hundreds or thousands of sites think that a peculiar page is applicable for a given set of terms, that page can manage to rank well even if the terms NEVER seem in the text itself
• Global Popularity of the Site - More popular sites, as announced by the number and power of the links pointing to them, provide more powerful links. Thus, while a link from may be a valuable vote for a site, a link from ibnlive.com or usatoday.com carries far more weight. This is one area where Page Rank (taking over it was precise), could be a good assess, as it's planned to compute world-wide quality.

• Popularity of Site in Applicable Communities - In the example above, the weight or power of a site's vote is based on its raw popularity across the web. As search engines became more advanced and granular in their access to link data, they recognized the existence of "current communities"; sites on the same subject that often interlink with one another, citing documents and rendering unique data on a peculiar topic. Sites in these communities provide more value when they link to a site/page on a relevant subject rather than a site that is largely irrelevant to their topic.

• Text Directly bordering the Link - Search engines have been noted to weight the text directly bordering the link with keen important and applicable than the other text on the page. Thus, a link from inside an on-topic paragraph may carry greater weight than a link in the sidebar or footer.

• Subject Matter of the Indexing Page - The current relationship between the subject of a given page and the sites/pages get linked to on it & the factor into the value a search engine allots to that link. Thus, it will be more worthful to have links from pages that are related to the site/pages subject matter than those that have trivial to do with the topic.

These are only a few of the many factors search engines measure and weight when evaluating links.