As someone interested in online business, I’m quite sure you’re sick of hearing about the importance of links -Â unfortunately, this article will bring you no comfort!
Okay, so you’ve picked out a nice little niche to develop a site for, you’ve got a list of keywords you want to rank for, and you’re ready to go… STOP!!! Those keyphrases you have with 30 million competing pages can either be very easy to rank for, or extremely difficult - and the only way to make reasonably sure is with a little due diligence.
In the stock market, due diligence is researching a company, its performance, etc., before buying; in the online business world, your due diligence should involve at least making sure you can rank for the terms that will bring enough traffic to make the business viable.
Sure, you can visit the top 10 pages and see how much PR the sites have, but honestly page rank is nearly worthless as an indicator these days - and do you really want to hinge the success of your business on Google’s total page count? So what you’re left with is back link scans.
Using software like SEO Elite, or even some of the free tools scattered about the internet, you can easily generate a complete listing of your competition’s entire link profile.
Looking at the above screenshot taken from SEO Elite, we can see how software like this organizes useful data so you can see how many links the site has, what sort of domain the links come from, what the page title is for each link, what the anchor text is, and so on.
What this essentially means is that you can sort-of spy on the competition; now don’t take me wrong, this is by no means an exact science, however if you find a term with a lot of sites with 10 or 20 links with anchor text that doesn’t align with the term they are ranking for, then you’ve got a good term. On the flip side, if you find a term filled with sites having 1200+ links with good anchor text, then you know perhaps you should wait on this one awhile.
This allows you to work on the low-hanging fruit first, and then move on to the harder terms once your website is getting traffic.
To be fair, this method of determining difficulty is slowly on the way out as search engines turn more towards user data than factors directly under webmasters’ control. However, this has worked for the past 2 years, and even as the search engines get smarter, it will be more than a few years before conducting link scans on your competition is no longer valuable.
April 23rd, 2007 at 3:52 am
[…] Today, Dave and I met in Waterford, Ontario, for a few hours of “working” mixed with a short game of Warmachine and me proving how crappy I am at Guitar Hero II. Generally what we came up with was a new way to make use of back link scans for marketing to our competition’s customers. […]