Well, I’m back to continue the Sunday Morning SEO series. I took a little break of three months because I was busy with client work. I’m creating backup posts beforehand so I won’t have to take a break next time.
Anyways, today let’s look at one of my favorite link building tactics. It’s a powerful tactic that involves competitive analysis.
Basically, you check out the links of your top competitors and then try to build the same links. I like this strategy because you can find great links. Also, if a top competitor has a link, it’s probably helping them in the rankings and you want the same benefit.
I tried this tactic on a client a couple weeks ago and found three great .edu links that their competitors had. It was pretty easy to build the same links for my client. I simply emailed the professors who were in charge of the site, told them about my client’s site, and they added the links.
How to Examine Your Competitors’ Links
So, how can you look at a competitor’s links? Fortunately, it’s an easy process.
Go to Yahoo! Search and use this syntax:
linkdomain:competing-site.com -site:competing-site.com
The above code tells Yahoo! Search to pull up the links of your competitor’s site without including their internal links.
You can even do research of the links on a single page. For example, the following code will show the links pointing to my last blog post.
link:https://blogherald.com/2009/05/31/using-anchor-text-effectively-part-2/ -site:blogherald.com
This syntax is helpful if you want to research a section of a site. For instance, you have a tech blog that just covers Apple products. You could use the syntax to examine links of the Apple section of a more comprehensive tech site.
Over to You
Try out this tactic and let me know how it works for you.
