Search Optimization SEO

Analyze the Backlinks of Your Competitors

It is important when you are targeting reasonably competitive keywords, to understand the link building strategy of your competitors. An easy way to do this is to search for their backlinks in yahoo by using the search query link:www.yourcompdeditor.com . The search results here will be your competitors backlinks. You should be using the SEO Quake Firefox extension while you do this so that you can see the PR of the pages containing their links as well the number of backlinks of those pages and other metrics integrated into the search results.

 

By doing this you should get a feel for their link building strategy. Are they primarily using directory submission, or maybe blog posting or article marketing. Do they have a large number of links or are there a smaller number with higher Page Rank.

 

 

Many SEOs believe a strong method is to copy the backlink strategy of your competitors and then do one better. By doing this analysis, you will gain two things, you might find some sites that link to your competitors that may also be willing to link to you, or at the least you may learn some new link building techniques you can apply to your own site. It may also be that you believe your link building techniques will be superior to theirs and it will only be a matter of time before you are competing for the top spots.

 

 

You can also take this one step further and analyse the on page optimization of your competing pages. By doing this, you may uncover some other keywords they are targeting that you have not discovered in your keyword analysis. After an analysis of the competitiveness and volume of these keywords, you may decide to add these to your own list of words you are targeting.

 

 

You can also learn a lot about SEO by doing a study of sites ranking for more competitive keywords than you are currently targeting yourself. Here you can see the vast quantity of links required to take competitive one word keywords.

 

 

In any area of business it is important to understand your competitors’ business strategy. SEO is no different.