Archive for the ‘links’ Category
When it comes to determining keyword competition – backlinks are king. You can only do so much with on-page SEO and the site owners who are really competing for search engine ranking will probably have fairly well optimized pages. That means that analyzing keyword competition really comes down to analyzing backlinks.
Remember that backlinks, especially keyword anchored backlinks, account for the most weight in the way the search engines rank pages. That is why you need to analyze backlinks if you really want to know if you can compete for a particular keyword phrase.
The “traditional” way to estimate competition is to search for the phrase in quotes, but that is just a quick and dirty way to get some kind of idea of how much competition you have. It doesn’t really tell you how hard it will be to take a top spot in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
The best way to gauge your competition for a top position is to do backlinks analysis on the pages that are currently in the positions you want to overtake. You do that by using Yahoo Site Explorer.
So, how do you go about determining keyword competition with Yahoo Site Explorer?
Please note: I would only do this for your primary keyword unless you have backlinks analysis software to make it less time consuming. The method that follows works very well, but it does take a lot of time to do right.
First you want to be clear on what you are looking for.
You want to know how many backlinks your top ranked competition has and ultimately how many keyword anchored backlinks they have — that is the time consuming part.
Here is what you do step by step assuming it is Google rankings that you are targeting:
Search for your keyword phrase (without quotes) on Google. We are checking for Google ranking, but we will actually use Yahoo to analyze backlinks. Google is very stingy on backlinks information and only shows you a fraction of the results. Yahoo Site Explorer gives you most of the backlinks in their database.
Either copy and paste the URLs of the top pages into notepad or just keep this browser window open and open a new one to use Yahoo site explorer.
I would start with the number 10 result. It will be the easiest to research because it will probably have the smallest number of backlinks. This will also tell you if you have a good chance of getting on to page one.
Copy and paste the URL of the site into Yahoo site explorer. When Yahoo displays the results click on the “inlinks” button and then select “except from this domain” from the show inlinks drop-down. This will tell you how many backlinks that page has. If it is just a few you are done checking that site and you can be pretty sure you can beat it.
If the site has a thousands of backlinks you don’t know if you can beat it (easily) or not but if the domain, folder or file name does not contain the keyword phrase you probably can. The way to know for sure is to analyze the links to the page for anchor text which no one in their right mind would do manually for thousands of links.
There are some free tools on the Web that try to automate the above process, but the ones I have tried have too many drawbacks to really be useful.
The only tool I’ve tried for analyzing backlinks that can recommend is not free, but the cost is minimal for the time it can save you. You not only save time in checking backlinks, you also save the time you would have spent building sites that you will never be able to get ranked well because they have thousands of keyword anchored backlinks.
You will also be amazed at how many sites with thousands of backlinks only have a few, and sometimes, no keyword anchored backlinks. These sites are easy to beat, but you would never know it without good analysis of their backlinks. I have found some real profitable keywords this way that everyone else ignored.
My keyword competition analysis took of choice is WebComp Analyst by Jonathan Leger. The software lets you do in minutes what would take you hours, if not days to do manually. WebComp Analyst is also a very good keyword research and suggestion tool.
I’ve used subscription based tools and I own a couple other big name keyword tools, but WebComp Analyst it the only one I continue to use and the only one that effectively analyzes backlinks. It is easy and it works to save me time and make me money.
There are many places you can buy one way links, but is it wise to buy links for your website? Like many other questions in life there are numerous things to consider before you decide whether or not to buy links.
First let’s take a look at the goals that would prompt someone to buy text links.
Boosting Page Rank
Whether there is a real advantage to a high page rank is another question for another post. However, regardless of the answer, people still strive to get a higher Google page rank. People often buy high page rank links with this as their primary goal.
Getting Indexed Quickly
Some web site owners buy high page rank links for a short period of time just to get a new site indexed.
Improving Search Engine Ranking
The search engines place a high weight on how many and what kind of links point to your pages. Webmasters looking for a fast and easy way to get better rankings often buy text links. The best effect is obtained when they buy contextual links instead of buying links that are in a list on the sidebar.
Getting More Direct Traffic
Advertising is actually a form of link buying with the motivation of getting traffic from the ad itself instead of for the SEO effects of the link.
With each of the above goals there are risks. Google does not like paid links and they have been known to slap those who buy links. if you buy high page rank links and don’t have a lot of natural high page rank links you may get Google slapped. Google usually slaps you by stripping their page rank. However, they may also totally de-index your site.
If you just buy a few links for getting indexed quickly or improving your ranking and don’t appear to be trying to manipulate your page rank you are probably pretty safe.
Even if Google doesn’t penalize your site when you buy one way links there is another big disadvantage …
It is pretty expensive to buy links and most site owners can’t afford to pay month after month. When they stop paying the links disappear. If the paid links were a significant portion of the total links that can be bad news.
I have personally decided to not buy links, but I do use some services that allow me to place my own links within posts on a number of blogs. With these services your links don’t vanish if you decide to drop your membership. These services are much more affordable than buying links and much less risky for the webmaster.
Of the one way link services I have used, there are only two that I maintain a membership with and recommend to others. The more lower cost service is 1waylinks and it is worth the investment for anyone that wants to increase search engine rankings.
I’ll clue you in in another post on the other service which is considerably more expensive but worth it if you have a lot of sites to promote and are already making money.
Both of these services can get you to the front pages of the search results and you don’t need to buy one way links and take on the expense and risks that comes when you buy links.
Whether you are looking for help with link building or on-page SEO, I have a valuable free report that will want to grab.
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- What you MUST have in place if you want top rankings
- How to optimize any web page in minutes
- How to pick keywords that will make money
- Essential free tools to save you time and money
- How and where you can get great one way links for free
Run on over to the sign up page and get yours now: Free Report
SEO link building is the process getting links to a website for the purpose of boosting the site’s search engine ranking. All other things being equal, the more links you have your website the better it will rank. However, all other things are seldom equal and your SEO link building will be much more successful if you incorporate these seven SEO link building principles:
Keyword Rich Anchor Text
One of the most important characteristics of good SEO links is to have the anchor text be the keyword phrase for which you are trying to improve your search engine rankings. The anchor text is also known as link text and is the words that display on the page for your link. Remember that you often don’t have direct control over the wording used to link to your site. Most of the time people will link to your site by either the site name or the page title. That is one reason you should create your blog and page titles with your primary keywords.
Keyword Diversity
The search engines, particularly Google, will rank your page much better if the linking appears natural. That means there should be some randomness to the characteristics of the links. If you get 1000 links to your site all using your primary keyword phrase it does not look natural and your ranking may be penalized. When you have control over the anchor text you should vary the keyword phrases being used.
Keyword Context
You will find when you do your own SEO link building or you work with in an SEO link building service that many of your links will be part of a link list. The sites linking to you may have a list on the side panel for links. While these links are still helpful they are not the best SEO links. The most effective links are those that appear in the text of the page especially when that text is relevant to the page being linked.
Website and Page Topic
Keep in mind that the search engines have the primary mission of providing relevant links based on the search being performed. A large part of determining that relevancy is placing a higher value on links from sites on the same topic. This is something of the same effect as the keyword context mentioned above. For example, suppose you are doing search engine optimization for a page about blue running shoes. You would want to look to get links from other sites is topic is running shoes. And, if you can get a link from a page on that site about blue running shoes you have a very valuable boost to your link building SEO.
Website Authority
Website authority can be viewed as how much the search engines trust the website. There are a lot of factors that go into website authority and they include the age of the website, which other sites link to them, how focused they are on a particular topic, and what sites they link to. This is one way the search engines fight link spam. Link spam is defined as links coming from sites designed specifically for the purpose of link building SEO with no real content. There are many link building companies that build their entire SEO link building service using link spam. If you can get authority sites to link to your pages you are showing that your site also has value and deserves higher rankings.
Link Diversity
Is a good idea to get links from as many different domains and from as many different types of sites as possible. For example, a popular SEO link building technique is to post pages on free websites and blogs and link back to your main site. You can make this strategy much more effective if you use a number of different sites. Instead of creating 10 Squidoo lenses you can create three lenses, three hub pages, two WordPress blogs and two blogger sites.
Links per Page
Another SEO link building factor to consider is the number of links per page. You will get much more value if the page linking to you as half a dozen links then if the page has hundreds of links. Basically the more links on the page the more diluted the effect of links. However, this effect can be mitigated by some of the other factors we discussed. For example, a page on an authority site with 50 links could be more valuable than the link from a less established site with only five links on the page.
You need to take these link building SEO principals together and find the balance that is right for your site. You seldom will be able to put them all together at once, but if you can manage to follow most use principles most of the time you’ll end up with very successful SEO links and a very successful website.
Want to learn more? I’ve written a free report that will help you achieve Fast and Easy Search Engine Ranking.
Before I tell you why you need one way backlinks perhaps I should provide some information on what they are and how they differ from other types of links.
The term backlink is used to differentiate incoming links to your website from outgoing links or links between other websites. One way backlinks are links from other sites that you have no outgoing links to. The situation where you link to another site and they link back to you is called two way or reciprocal linking. There is also three way linking but that’s another topic for another article.
Most webmasters are familiar with reciprocal linking. This type of link exchange has existed since the beginning of the Web. Many of the millions of websites on the net have mostly reciprocal links and few or no one way links. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links, so why all the fuss about one-way backlinks? The simple answer is that search engines place more value on one way backlinks.
Search engine ranking is largely a popularity contest. A link from a website is like a vote in that contest. Google and the other search engines use the logic that if one site links to another without requiring a link back they consider the linked site to be a valuable and relevant resource. Both reciprocal and one way links have the potential to give your site direct traffic, but one way links will give a much bigger boost to your search engine ranking.
The above gives you a glimpse at how search engine ranking works but is not the whole story. There are a number of factors that make some one way backlinks much more effective in improving your search engine ranking than others. Here are some of the major factors to consider:
- website authority
- links per page
- website and page topic
- keyword rich anchor text
- keyword context
- keyword diversity
- link diversity
More explanation of these factors will need to wait for future articles and I will link to those articles from here as they are written. You may want to consider subscribing to my newsletter or the RSS feed of this site to be alerted to updates. You can also read about how to get links to your website for more information that will help your search engine rankings.
Simply because you are visiting this site I know for sure that you are looking to get links to your website. I don’t know if you’ve been around the Internet as long as I have, so I’ll give you a little background information. I was actually using the Internet before there was a World Wide Web and everything was text based. In those days there were no links and no websites as we know them today.
The World Wide Web came into existence in 1990 and thus was created the quest to get website links. However, for about six years, there was only one motivation to get links to your website. That motivation was to get direct traffic to your site. In 1996 Google appeared on the scene and added a new reason to get links to your site. Google started using link popularity as a primary way to determine which sites were the best for any particular keyword.
Today Google accounts for almost 80% of all Web searches and Web search is the primary way people find websites. That fact makes getting a high ranking in Google the most important factor in having a successful website. That leads us to the point of this article. If you want to succeed on the Net you need to know how to get links to your website.
The old fashioned way to get links is to exchange links with other webmasters. Link exchanges can be manual or using automated systems. Unfortunately, two way links don’t have he power they once did for increasing your rankings. They may get you a little direct traffic, and they are worth doing if you can do it without spending a lot of time on it. However, one way links carry much more weight in getting your site ranked in the search engines, especially Google.
So how do you get these coveted one way links? You can buy them, but there are many drawbacks to buying links which I will go into in more depth in another article. For now, I’m just going to post a list of other ways to get one way links and I’ll give you more details on how to use the methods in future posts. Here is my “short list” of ways to get one way links:
- Blog Commenting
- Forum Posting
- Directory Submission
- RSS Feed Directories
- Social Bookmarking
- Article Marketing
- Classified Ads
- Press Releases
- Link Baiting
- Guest Blogging
- FFA Sites (not recommended)
- Posting on Advertising Blogs
- Creating Free Blogs (lots of these sites will be detailed later)
- Building Your Own Hosted Blog Network
- Your Circle of Online Friends
- Sneaky Backdoor Listings (mainly free service registrations that get your links on authority sites)
- Subscribing to One Way Link Services
The list is not in any particular order. I’m sure I will be adding to the above list, but that gives you a good start. As mentioned earlier, look for details on all these methods soon. If you have ways to get links to your website in mind that I missed that you would like covered please post a comment and let me know.
