The importance of link building - pt 3

• Sep. 20, 2002

Next, do a search on your key phrases to see who’s ranking in the top five to ten spots.  This is your biggest competition.  You will want to have at least as many good quality links as these sites, in order to boost your visibility in the search engines.

 

So, now that you have the google toolbar, and you know who your competitors are, how do you go about collecting those links?  Take your competitors URL and go to a website with a link popularity checker, such as Marketwatch (click here for their link checker).  Put in the URL and check the links for your competitors.  Or you can manually do this by going to each engine and searching out links for the URL’s using the method on the search engine.  You can usually do this through their advanced search options.  There are also various free and pay software packages out that help you do this.

 

Once you’ve compiled a list of the sites linking to your competitors, go through the list and look at the sites.  What kind of site is this?  Is it related to your industry?  Do they have a links page where you can submit your site for inclusion?  If you find the site isn’t related it probably isn’t worth your time to submit your URL to them for inclusion, even if they have a high PageRank.

 

As you can well imagine, this can be a very time consuming process.  For example, a link popularity check for our site, www.searchengineposition.com, returns 582 links in Alltheweb, 254 in Altavista, 144 in MSN, and 686 links in Google.  I would have to go through each of these links and qualify them in order to determine if I can and should use them as part of my link building strategy, if I were a competitor.

 

Let’s move ahead.  Now you have qualified all your competitors’ links, determined the best ones to approach to put a link to your site, and have even had many of them put links on back to you.  Now what?

 

First would be to ensure that the pages with links to your site are indexed in all the major engines.  You will have to manually search to ensure this.  If so you are fine, as the next time a search engine spider visits that page, the changes will be noted.  If not, make sure you keep track of these pages and submit them to the engines which don’t show them as being indexed.

 

Finally, you wait.  Once you’ve submitted your links from link building it can take six months or longer before you see the results of your work.  You can always go to the link checking sites to see if your links have gone up, or watch your own PageRank on the Google toolbar, as it should start to rise as Google indexes the new pages.

 

Keep in mind that once these links are indexed you will want to go back and repeat the process – analyze your competitors links, pick out qualified links that you can submit your site to, and submit, see if they are already indexed, and submit if not.

 

I also want to emphasize that this is only one strategy you must employ to help increase your rankings in the search engines.  You should always monitor how you are doing in relation to your competition and analyze why you went up or down in relation to the other sites.  Also, refreshing the content and/or adding properly optimized pages to your site is very helpful as this gives the search engine spiders more content to index which will help the engines better qualify your site.

 

Review your visitor logs, if you have them, to see which pages people are visiting and try to determine why?  See which pages are not being visited, and make sure you are not generating 404 (page not found) errors.

 

And, most important, keep searching out good quality links for your site.   For more on link building, read our article here on the bowtie theory.  It explains how the world wide web is related and how linking sites affect one another.

 

 

Rob Sullivan