Competition Research

In this section we will examine how to replicate the backlinks of your competition. Examining your competitions' backlinks is a great way to find out just what is causing them to rank so highly. If you find an extra juicy backlink or two that they have, then you should try and obtain a link from the same page if you can.

You will remember from my first tutorial that the Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great way to research which links are pointing to a particular site.

So navigate over to Yahoo.com and type the following in the search field - linkdomain:http://site.com

(Simply replace the 'site.com' part with your competition's website)

You will see a number of links come up. All these links are webpages that contain backlinks that are pointing to your competition's site. What you want to do is go to each of the websites listed here and also place your link on the site as well. This may be easy or hard depending upon the type of site that is linking to your competition's site.

If the link is from a blog post, then all you need to do is simply make a comment on the blog. If the link is from a social bookmarking site, then try and submit a review of the site if possible, with your link included in the message. Make sure it isn't spammy.

If the link is from a link directory, then sign up to the directory and submit your link on the same page. If the link is from a "Link Page" on a website, then write an e-mail to the webmaster requesting your link be added to the page as well.

Some links will be more tricky to replicate, particularly if they come from sites that have given a direct review about your competition's website. If this is the case, and you believe your website is of good quality, then try contacting the webmaster of the site in question, explaining that you would like your site reviewed as well. The worst that can happen is that they will say no/ignore you, but you may be quite surprised how many will do a review of your site.

I've received a large number of .edu links in the past, including from PR7 .edu sites, simply by contacting the webmaster and requesting they have a look at my site to see whether or not it's valuable enough to be added to their links page. The response you get may be quite surprising. You can't be shy in Internet Marketing, so get in there and give it a go.

SEOQuake

If your competition has thousands of backlinks, then it can be quite difficult trying to replicate each one. Therefore you will need to prioritise which ones are worth your time, and which ones are not.

One free tool I use and highly recommend is SEOQuake. You will need to use the Firefox web browser in order to install this plugin.

Once installed, SEOQuake will display the page rank of every website within the SERP rankings. You may want to avoid trying to get backlinks from sites with a Page Rank of 0. You will find this tool will eliminate a large amount of time, saving you having to click each site and check its Page Rank.

It's also useful because it will put a line through any links that contain the 'No Follow' attribute. This can save you having to check the Page Source of every website you go to to find out whether the links use 'No Follow' or not.

Beating Your Competition At Their Own Game

For every site that has a backlink pointing to your competition, try and replicate two backlinks from the same site, but on different pages.

For example, say www.example.com/page1.html has a backlink pointing to your competition's website. Not only do you want to try and get a backlink from www.example.com/page1.html but you also want to try and get another backlink from the same site but on a different page, such as from www.example.com/page2.html.

You're effectively beating your competition at their own game, by replicating all their backlinks and doubling them.

Combine this with your normal link building methods, and you should outrank your competition's website within a few months, depending upon how competitive the keyword phrase is.