Thursday, January 8, 2009

Quickly Increase Your Website’s Inbound Links By Spying On Your Competition

Guest post by Justin Vanhove

If you are a website owner or if you have a blog you know that getting inbound links can be a tedious process. Even more tedious is that you have to find relevant links. Most webmaster’s obtain their links from link exchanges, getting accepted into online directories, distributing articles to article directories, and submitting links to social bookmarking websites.

Those are all great ways of getting in pointing links to your website or blog. However, it is not an efficient process and can be quite time consuming. It takes a lot of time to find relevant websites to submit your articles to, directories to submit your site or blog to, and contact webmasters to see if they are interested in exchanging links. Social bookmarking is the only real method that does not take a whole lot of time.

Enough about that, the rest of the post is about how you can build links faster and more efficiently.

First identify exactly what your website is about. This should not be a problem if you built your site/blog around a niche. Then go to the four major search engines. They are Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask which account for over 95% of all online searches. Type in your website’s primary keyword or the keyword of your homepage. Write down the four websites that rank number one in each major search engines results page. You will end up with exactly four websites, one for each search engine unless a website ranks at the top of more than one major search engine.

Then find out where they got their links from. That will explain a lot about why they are at the top. In almost all cases the websites at the top of search result pages have tons of relevant links. That is the only way to rank high for competitive keywords. To find where their links came from you can use a host of free tools that are available online. Do not pay for this information. You can get it for free.

I use a free tool called Search It. It is provided by SiteSell.com which is a popular online company that specializes in the website building niche. The tool was originally created only for customers of the company. Recently it has been used by the company as a marketing tool, a tool to build credibility for Sitesell and eventually lead to more sales. That is why it is now free.

You can use Search It for a number of things. One of the things you can use it for is to find the back links of your competition. That is what I primarily use it for and it has saved me tons of time. Instead of having to search for inbound link opportunities I can get a huge list of them in a minute. A search of a website’s back links is more like a link opportunity search than just wanting to know where they got their links from. Rather than having to perform tons of searches for relevant inbound links opportunities you will have a list of 10,000 or more and can zoom through the process.

Other than links from random websites who just happen to like that site, all other links will be prime link opportunities. Also, since you are researching the links of the top websites in your niche chances are those links will be highly relevant. Highly relevant links are given more weight and are worth more to the search engines. The higher the page rank and relevancy of the link are what determine how much a particular link is worth when ranking pages for search results.

When doing this you will still be obtaining most of your links through article distribution, online website directories, and social bookmarking. Instead of having to go out and look for them they come to you in less than a second. The only thing you will have to find on your own manually is webmaster’s that will agree to exchange links. As for link exchanges they may not worth the time and effort depending on who you exchange links with. As a rule if a website has more links than you it will be worth a exchange. If not it will not be worth your time.

Now days search engines are getting more advanced and it is important to have one way links. Those are links from a website that you do not link to, therefore making it not a link exchange. That adds a lot of extra weight to the links ultimately boosting search engine rankings. In short you want one way links because they are the most valuable links. This method will help you accomplish just that and do it in a timely process.

Author Bio
If you would like to learn more you can make money online and make money on the internet. As for the search it tool you can do a quick google search and download it or visit one of the links above and download it for free. The links above will take you to my homepage. The download link can be found by clicking on the “free tools” button on the left side navigation bar. Thank you for reading and I hope the technique in this post saves you as much time as it has saved me.