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.

AOL Purchases Online Marketing Network

AOL Purchases Online Marketing Network

AOL said on Tuesday it has purchased an online affiliate marketing network, as part of a strategy to pad its Internet publicizing operations.

AOL has not exposed any of its financial terms.

Buy. at is a meshing in which publishers pay to its member Web Advertisers only whenever a visitor comes to the site and action takes palce in response to an ads, such as making a purchase.

AOL's fifth in 12 months, arrives a day before the Time Warner's first quarter fiscal report, on which capitalists are hoping the newly appointed Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes may talk about the plan to reconstitute the media empire.

Leveraging

Whether it's called networking, word-of-mouth or some trendy buzzword, such as “leveraging” or “viral marketing,” getting the word out about your products and services with every human contact you make has been one of the most effective marketing tools long before e-commerce.

When you operate an e-commerce website, the key entity you own is your domain name, which is effectively your company name. And the best way to succeed in your business is to attract as many potential customers to your website as possible by continually spreading the domain name, your address on the Web, in any ethical way possible.

You can include this web address on all your business cards and as part of your signature at the bottom of all your e-mail messages. Just think of all the times business cards are passed on and messages are forwarded, creating countless opportunities for your Web address to be noticed at little cost.

If you attend trade shows, look at all the companies that give away freebies, such as T-shirts and pens and refrigerator magnets, imprinted with their web addresses. Doing the same will give potential customers an item that will get the FunnyWidgets.com address before them every time they use the item.

Press releases are another inexpensive and effective marketing tool—if they are targeted to the appropriate newspapers and magazines. A press release about your new products sent to Widgets & Gizmos Quarterly magazine, for example, might lead to a call from a writer seeking more information and an article—and plenty of free publicity to your target audience—about your products and company.

Even though you are operating in the online sphere, don't forget traditional forms of advertising. Print, television and radio ads have often proven effective in attracting website visitors. Even billboards can draw in visitors as passing motorists make a mental note of a catchy website name and are curious to see what it's all about.

Back in the online world, there are other ways to promote your website, although you'll want to be careful not to antagonize Internet users weary from blatant marketing pitches where they don't belong. Posting information, along with your website address, in newsgroups and mailing lists can draw in visitors if you are providing information newsgroups and mailing list subscribers want and not just blindly spamming them.

Another online marketing technique is to approach websites with products and services related to yours and offer to publish links to their websites if they will reciprocate. Driving web visitors from you website to theirs and vice versa is often a great way to boost sales for all involved.