7 Tricks to Get a Google of Links

7 Tricks to Get a Google of Links

SEO is a race. And in any race learning from your competitors makes you a better runner. Even when you're running first it's sometimes good to look back and check the runner-ups. And if you're not the yellow jersey guy, you absolutely should examine the leaders: their gear, their training, their strategy. In SEO the most interesting thing about your competition are their links.

Whether you like it or not SEO is still pretty much about links. Good link profile can make up for almost any lack of optimized content and other onpage flaws. Love or hate, the best thing you can do about it is embrace the fact and run with it.

So let's go through some tricks that will enable you to look deeper into your competition's link profile granting you access to the restricted areas: their locker room, dirty laundry and even the briefing hall where they plan their link building strategies.

Let's talk competitive link research

Finding out where your competitors' links come from is not all that hard. You just go to Yahoo! or Google and type in link:www.your-competitor.com to get a list of inbound links to the site.

Yahoo's much better in that respect as it tends to give more extensive and accurate data. The problem here is that there's a limit of 1,000 links per website which is often not enough as the fattest link sources get left behind the limit fence. Here're some tips to break through to the other side.

Note: If you're lazy like me skip to the end of the article where I'll share a tool that does it all much quicker.

Trick 1: Search for links to particular web pages of a competing site

Alongside with link:www.your-competitor.com search for link:www.your-competitor.com/products.html or link:www.your-competitor.com/services.html and so on.

Trick 2: Exclude internal links

You may examine the internal linking structure of your competition if you want to gain some insight on their navigation and marketing steps. But as we want to find more external links, let's exclude the internal ones.

You can do this by adding -site:site.com operator to your search query. Type in link:www.your-competitor.com -site:your-competitor.com and you'll get a list of external backlinks only.

There's a dropdown option in Yahoo! site explorer that does the same.

Trick 3: Exclude links coming from certain domains

The -site:[code] modifier lets you exclude links coming from specific sites. So, whenever you see a large chunk of links coming from same domain add [code]-site:thisdomain.com modifier to your query and the links from this site will get replaced with new ones.

You can add -site: multiple times in one query so that you have something like this:

Trick 4: Check links coming from certain TLDs

This is a little known trick. The site: modifier actually lets you get a list of links coming from domains with certain TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .co.uk and so on. Just type in link:www.your-competitor.com site:.gov and you'll get a list of .gov sites linking to your rival.

Note: Do this in Yahoo! regular search, not site explorer

Trick 5: Exclude links coming from certain TLDs

This is an even lesser known trick. You can exclude certain tlds from the results with the -site:.tld modifier. Usually the biggest chunk of links comes from .com's so add a -site.com modifier and you'll get lots of new link data.

Trick 6: Use different combinations of the first 5 tricks

Try link:your-competitor.com/page.html -site:your-competitor.com -site:.com

Or link:your-competitor.com site:.org -site:wikipedia.org

Give it a thought and I'm sure you'll come up with lots of your own. Feel free to share your findings in the comments

Trick 7: Use the above 6 tricks in different search engines

Don't limit your searches to Yahoo! and Google, go to AltaVista, Alexa, (Bing doesn't give you link data, so forget about it) but then there're Exalead, Excite and tons of regional search engines. Search them, remove the duplicates and you'll have a goooooooooooooooogol of competitor's links to study.

Note: Some search engines have a different set of operator so you'll need to type domain: instead of link:.

Getting it all done fast

This sure seems like a lot of work and it is. Moreover, getting the links list is only the beginning and the easy part of competitive link research. Once you get the list you need to analyze each link, weed out poor quality sites and only leave the ones you can get a link from. Now THAT's a lot of work.

I'm too lazy to do this all by hand, besides I value my time too much to waste it on such kind of work. That's why I use SEO SpyGlass an advanced link analysis tool that employs all the tricks described in this article (plus some more advanced ones I don't even know) to get up to 25,000 links per domain, which is much, much more than any other tool can get.

SEO SpyGlass also finds all the data I need to analyze the links:

Google PR of the domain and linking page
The URL and title of the linking page
The anchor text and description
Whether the link is still on the page (sometimes the link gets removed but search engines will think it's there till they reindex the page).
Whether the link is no-follow or dofollow
How many other links are on the page

How much link value the link passes And some their data like TLDs, domain age, country, etc.

If you want to do competitive link research seriously I'd strongly recommend trying SEO SpyGlass out. And of course you can always use my tricks whenever you want to run a quick background check on that new guy on your block.

Ref: http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/7-tricks-to-get-a-Goooooooooooogle-of-links.html

Introduction into Internet Marketing

Introduction into Internet Marketing
Starting from the early 1990s Internet marketing made an amazing development from simple text-based websites that offered product information into highly evolved and complete online businesses promoting and selling their services on the Internet.
Nowadays, the Internet marketing industry has become a complicated and branchy science involving a great deal of theoretical knowledge in combination with applied techniques. As a science, it ranges from browser-side and server-side programming and coding on one end to marketing and economics on the other.
Internet marketing means the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes Banner and Text Advertising, Email Marketing, Interactive Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Marketing (including Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising).
Our first stage of the Internet Marketing course will start with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a specific area of an online marketers' business. Mainly, its purpose is to increase targeted traffic from search engines via organic search engine ranking, paid listing and advertising. Here you'll be shown the main principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link building, and paid advertising campaigns.
Actually, every successful search engine optimizer should be aware of top search engine demands and consider them while creating website and improving on-page and off-page factors for Web pages. There are numerous important factors influencing search engine ranking of a Web page. The SEO division of the course provides profound and consecutive lessons depicting each step of your optimization work. Search Engine Advertising is the last topic of the SEM Stage.
There are certain methods that go beyond SEM that can help improve your site online visibility. These include, for instance, creating and spreading a banner / ad network and / or paid link partnerships, as well as email marketing and building affiliate relationships with other websites.
Email marketing is an independent branch which has to be dealt with separately and does not have much in common with SEM. Email marketing is a subject of our next stage and there we will provide insight into the main direct mail campaign steps and guidelines.
Banner networks relate to SEM as long as they touch upon your link popularity (which is a component of SEM).
In the following stage you'll study the Affiliate Marketing division of Internet Marketing. It is a popular method for promoting web businesses when with few marketing dollars marketers can establish a presence and earn a profit recruiting affiliates. Such partner networks can grow with your company business projects and add its profit to your marketing budget.
The most vital stage of the whole course is Web Analytics. Its role can be hardly underestimated as Web Analytics is an essential measure for continually improving web business performance, advertising campaigns, organic search engine results, ranking positions and others. Generally, Web Analytics deals with the traffic already generated at the previous stages. Its primary goal is to improve traffic quality and enhance conversion.
Although it is possible (and advisable) to understand every theoretical aspect of Internet marketing, in practice you may do much better by specialization in a specific area or technique and simply start your Internet Marketing business. Our last stage provides a proper and clear scheme about how to estimate your potential, find a niche, manage projects and promote your services as online marketer, SEO consultant, etc.
What You Should Know before Getting Started with Online Marketing
The good news is that Internet marketing has rapidly grown and offers a broad array of opportunities for small and large businesses. From the previous introduction we became familiar with the Internet marketing science structure and the particular steps to follow do develop an online business.
At this point, before delving more deeply into the subject, let's define some main terms. Online marketing deals with websites and Web pages, search engines, email and the Internet as the base of the World Wide Web. All of these areas are used to advertise and sell goods and services.
Referencing the original Wikipedia encyclopedia project definitions of our basic terms, they are as follows:
The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.
The hypertext documents, or Web pages, reside on Web servers - special computers that receive requests for Web pages and can "serve" them to the requesting side.
Each Web server, or host, has its unique global address used to find it over the Internet. This address is called an "IP address". A typical IP address looks like four numbers separated by dots. For example, 63.146.123.0 is the address of the server where google.com is situated.
Each server can hold one or many websites. A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, typically bound to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. A website is identified uniquely by its domain name, e.g. http://www.webceo.com/.
Domain names are translated into IP addresses by the global DNS - domain name system. That is, when you type http://www.webceo.com/ in your browser, the latter first sends a DNS request, and receives the IP address of the server where http://www.webceo.com/ is hosted. The browser then connects to that server directly and asks for Web CEO's home page.
Each website is composed of many Web pages. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML, that is always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the website's server to display in the user's Web browser.
So when a new business is born on the Internet, or when an established brick and mortar enterprise goes online, it starts by creating a website. This is done by purchasing a domain name from an organization accredited to sell domain names, e.g. godaddy.com or register.com. Also, some hosting space must be purchased, so that there's some server ready to store the website. Then, several Web pages are created and linked to each other to make up this website. Finally, the website is linked to the domain name so that everyone can type this domain name in a browser and view these pages.
With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. A client program called a "user agent" retrieves information resources, such as Web pages and other computer files, from Web servers using their URLs.
Most commonly, the user agent is a kind of Web browser: Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Netscape, or the program that you use to view this lesson. It retrieves content from remote Web servers and displays it on your computer. You can then follow hyperlinks in each Web page to other World Wide Web resources, whose location (including their domain name) is embedded in the hyperlinks. The act of following hyperlinks from one website to another is referred to as "browsing" or sometimes as "surfing" the Web.
To find a Web page, you can always type its address in the address field of your browser. But what if you don't know the exact address, or want to find all Web pages from different websites on a particular topic?
This is when you use a search engine or directory for the search. There are 3 top search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Windows Live Search). These search engines are most preferred by Web surfers and every site owner strives to get included in their databases. If people can find your website through search engines, this search engine creates an invaluable source of traffic for you, which translates into income if you sell goods or services.
Actually, search engines are very numerous and differ according to how they work. We have a specific section for "Understanding Search Engines" which includes seven lessons to guide and familiarize you with their core principles.
There is one final point we'll look at, and that is the use of email for your online marketing activity. The topic is email marketing and using this form of communication to send goods and service offers to clients.
Electronic mail (abbreviated "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems.
Email predates the Internet; existing email systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Email was quickly extended and became additional and highly useful tool for the online marketers.
Email Marketing and other forms of Internet Marketing are depicted in this course to select and master your niche for a future online business.