Summary: Backlinking is a way to find other relevant websites who might give your site a link.
So you’re looking for good quality, relevant links to your website and you’ve heard of backlinking – what is it? It’s a good way to identify potential targets for your linking campaign, that’s what it is!
Backlinking means looking at which websites link to where. Primarily, you’ll be focusing on your competitors. If someone links to your competitor’s website, chances are, they’ll also consider linking to your website. So step one is to identify which sites you consider to be your direct competitors, and step two is to identify who links to those sites.
You can use Yahoo Explorer to see where a site is getting their links. Or, you can go to the Yahoo search engine and type this command:
linkdomain:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com
The inclusion of “-site:targetdomain.com” at the end has the effect of excluding links from your website back to your website. If you use Yahoo Explorer, you won’t be able to do this.
The results from Yahoo search engine itself appear in a list so they’re not so easy to download – you can use SEOmoz’s Linkscape or Link Diagnosis instead if you’d rather be able to download a spreadsheet.
Yahoo explorer by contrast will give you results that can be downloaded – you can take up to the first 1,000 entries via TSV which can be opened in Excel. You can then simply sort by URL in Excel and remove any internal links, and you’ll end up with just the external links which is what you want.
So what next?
The next step is to look at the pages that are linking to your competitors’ websites and determine whether they are worth pursuing a link from. Remember your links ideally should be from relevant, authority websites and it’s best if you can attain the anchor text you want rather than just your website name or URL (although these are not entirely without value).
You’ll then need to look on the linking page and determine the contact information for the website. Do this manually – extracting contact information using a program not only breaks the law (US only) but it may not always give you the best possible contact – thus your request for a link may be ignored.
Once you have a contact email address, you need to create an email requesting a link. See our article ‘How do I request a link?’ for more info and example emails.
Backlinking is an effective method of locating links that are likely to help your site rank better in the search engines. And if the content on your website is better than that of your competitor, there’s a chance that the site linking to your competitor may replace their link with yours!
As well as analysing competitors’ sites, try backlinking analysis on authoritative sites – sites linking to authoritative sites have an interest in your subject area and have granted links so again, you stand a good chance of success. In all cases, make sure your links are relevant, and from a site that is trusted.
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