Finding Links by Studying your Competitors
Several products allow you to see all your competitors’ backlinks, including my newly released reports. You can see your competitors’ backlinks, and get a report that breaks the list down into manageable chunks that you can investigate. The best place to begin your link building process is to look at your competitor’s links. If they are ranked number one for a keyword term, you will know that it is their links that got them to that position. The first thing you do is:
- Try to get some of the same links.
- Get ideas to find your own links.
Links from Forums and Blogs
Look at the report’s links from forums and blogs that do not have the “no follow”. You can then go to these forums and blogs and make posts or comments. Read the thread or blog post and make a helpful comment. If it is a forum, you should get involved. Do not go and make some spam post. Link building is hard work and don’t go looking for short cuts.
Getting Backlinks
See what types of content people are linking to as you go through your competitor’s backlinks. You need to create a similar type of content if you don’t have it already. You can send a personal email if you find a site that links to content you already have, When sending emails, your success rate will be higher if you send the email from the domain you are requesting a link from. Be complementary to them in your email. Tell them how much you like their site. Talk about the specific page that you want a link on. If they are linking to your competitor you have two choices you can ask them to also link to you or you can ask them to change the link to link to you instead.
If you get a rejection email, try to figure out why. If they don’t tell you why then send them an email asking if there is something you can change so that they will link to your site. If they do reveal why you were rejected, change your content or create new content and ask them again to link to your new content.
There are several programs you can use to mange this. I use Squid. You can also use Digixmas. Digixmas is not just for submitting to directories. You can go to their manual mode to visit a website. Once you send an email, just mark it as success. This way you know which ones you have worked on. You can use the bypass and failed flags to mark different things as well to help you remember what step in the process you are on.
Come visit http://linkrep.seofox.com and get reports on your competitors. If you don’t want to do all this work SEO Fox can do for you.
