Analysing your Competitors Backlinks:
Its easy to find out who is linking to your competitors. Yahoo is a key part in this process. You can use Yahoo to list all the backlinks that your competitor has, this is a great way to identify some quick wins. Find some of the good quality links that are giving your competitor the advantage. You can do this by visiting Yahoo and using the standard link command:
Link:www.yourcompetitorswebsite.com
This will direct you to Yahoo's site explorer.
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You can use the site explorer to query multiple competitors. Gain the edge today by using this great tool. You can scroll through thousands of links, potentially contacting some of the higher quality sites.
Yahoo Site explorer limits the volume of queries per hour so be careful when running queries, some people experience the Yahoo 999 error.
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Here you can see a snippet of the backlinks that MSN has. Sometimes you may see the website itself as a backlink, this only happens because the website refers to itself.
You can use the site explorer to find good quality links, although this process is tedious, you can eventually uncover some great links.
The types of links you want are:
" Links from relative websites
" Links from good quality websites
" If possible, links from authoritive websites such as websites with the .edu, .gov or .ac extension.
" Links from well established websites
" Links from websites that have a high page rank
You can uncover these factors using basic tools such as the Google toolbar (toolbar.google.com) and the way back machine at (www.archive.org)
As with the manual link development, you will want to contact these websites via personalized e-mail, avoid using too much of a generic template, as these will be ignored more often.
