We are going to learn how to use our competition to gain links by utilizing the Yahoo Site Explorer.  First things first, you need to come up with a list of keywords that people will use to get to your site.  Now this is an art in and of itself, so I’m going to save the finer details of keyword selection for another post.  For our purposes, select keywords that you believe are popular that your site pertains to.

Now we want to find the best and the brightest for those keywords.  This is incredibly simple.  Just go to google, enter your keywords and see what sites are ranked on the first page.  Ignore any educational or reference sites such as wikipedia that actually gain links naturally.  Ideally look for the most commercial sites, because they know the game when it comes to link building.

Now take the URL of the competitors site and enter it into Yahoo Site Explorer.  Now you can see all of the links that your competitor has that allows them to rank so high.  Not only that, but Yahoo makes it incredibly easy by listing the sites in their order of importance.  Your goal is to go through this list and get a link anywhere that allows it.  Generally you will find 3 types of sites that you can use: Link Directories, Do-follow blogs, and forums.

Notice I said Do-follow blogs!!  Yes they are few and far between, but this method allows you to find keyword relevant do follow blogs with ease!  Take as much time as you can stand getting these high quality links to your site.  Once I finally figured out this simple technique, many of my sites became very profitable.  It is so easy that a beginner can do it, and so effective that even the pros do it.  Have fun!!

The first reason is more or less common sense.  Someone searches for “how to do X and Y” and I have a page indexed that is “how to do X.”  Now somewhere on my site I may have another blog post that answers their question more completely.  Perhaps that page is new and hasn’t been indexed yet.  Or perhaps the SE user didn’t know exactly what they were looking for and after finding my page with their botched or incomplete search terms they find what they were actually looking for in a related post.

The second and most important reason to use the related post is for SEO purposes.  The main purpose is “interlinking.”  If you don’t know, interlinking simply is defined as the internal link structure within your own site.  Now suppose your get a high authority link to a certain page on your site about oranges.  Google now thinks that this page is important and relavant information.  Perhaps your post about oranges mentions fruit a good bit.  Now your related posts display other fruit related posts, like posts on grapefruit and apples.  With the related posts plugin you are actually pushing your own link juice so that now google sees that your other pages are relavant and important also.

Also another thing to consider is your indexing saturation.  This can be figured out by dividing the number of pages you have indexed in google by the number or pages that are on your site.  If you don’t know how to figure out the number of pages has index then read:

Know about your site and your competition – Google Operators

The related post plugin helps drastically with index saturation by pushing google to some of your older posts that happen to be relevant.  This is particularly useful if you have a large number of posts(1000+).  Now their are several related post plugins out their, and sadly I haven’t tried many of them.  The one I use is here:

WordPress Recent Post Plugin

1. Start with the high PR sites and work your way down

What you are looking for here is quality links back to your site.  Obviously it makes sense to start posting on the directories with the most link weight.  I haven’t compiled a list, but a great one is right here.

2.  My duplicate submission rule

Some directories allow you to submit duplicate content and some do not.  If you are not spinning your articles for uniqueness then I recommend this method.  Use a current blog post that has already been indexed by google.  If you don’t know how to check then read this.  Now the hyperlinks that you insert in the article, link to the next blog post that you plan on publishing as an article.  This is insuring that your next post will be indexed quickly, so that you can then publish it as an article.  Duplicate content does not apply to the first website to publish the article and get it indexed.  This way, you get to re-use your blog posts as articles and still ensure that you get the credit for the unique content.

3.  Get these link pages indexed!!

You can use a few of your free blogs from this post, to push the spiders to the new article pages that you have.  Make an effort to get every one of these pages indexed.  These are long term links from high PR sites.  Need I say more..

Free Blogs

Free Blogs are a great way to build some high quality links for your site.  I’ve stated in previous posts the huge advantage a person has by owning several websites.  This tactic evens the playing field a little bit, and allows you to do the same thing by taking advantage of free blog providers online.  First I should state that starting a free blog for the purposes of link building or SEO is often against the hosting sites rules and I do not condone this action(be careful and be discrete).

This method can be very effective given the high PR of most free blog sites.  PR is Google’s measuring stick, telling you how valuable the particular site is perceived to be by Google.  These links are high quality because they come from trusted sites.

Now, if you simply go spamming the free blogs you are just going to get your free blog banned, so lets use some class in doing this.  One thing that I like to do is write a generic blog post in word, then spin the article a little (spin – keep same content and present it in slightly different language) for each free blog site that I plan on posting it on.  This means I write 1 article and alter it slightly for each blog so they all appear unique to the SE’s.  When possible you always want to use ANCHOR text for a link, meaning that the hyperlinks should be inside of the article attached to keywords that you are trying to rank for.  Use your imagination and come up with a similar game plan.  You may even want to put 1 link to your site, and 1 link to another ‘free blog’ that you posted on for quick indexing.

I’m not going to give you a list of free blogs to use because they are increadibly easy to find.  Type “free blog” into google, and that should keep you busy for a while.  I would obviously start w/ Wordpress and Blogger and then move on down the line.  A good percentage of the blogs use WP or a similar platform, so you should be right at home.

If you have ever seen, under the comments sections, something that says TRACKBACK or PINGBACK, these comments are automated.  If you pingback a blog owner, often times they elect to automatically link back to the page that linked to them.  These pingbacks can be very valueable and I highly recommend that you take advantage of them.

Anytime that you cite another blog, if you link to it, you can have WP send the pingback.  You can turn this option on under Settings/Discussion.  Although the link back will be recipricol, if you get a successful trackback/pingback, it will often be from a blog that has more link weight than you do.  Recipricol links are not as good as one way links.  They are however, still valueable expecially if the other site is more respected than yours.

The first you should know about is the site operator.  It is fairly simple.  In the google search box type in site:yoursite.com and hit search.  This query is going to show you all of the pages from your site that google has in their index.  If you enter the search and nothing is found, you need to take efforts to get google to index your page.  For that read these 2 posts:

The second operator that you should know about is link.  To use this type in link:yoursite.com and hit search.  This will show you all of the links to your site that google has indexed and that you are getting credit for.  Remember the number of relavant links that you have strongly determines what type of search engine traffic you will get.  The more links the better.  You can also use this to investigate your competition.  Take some sites that rank higher than you do on google and see how many links that they have.  You can also investigate all of those pages that they have links on and attempt to get those sites to link to your webpage.

Here are some other basic operators and their functions:

• + (ex: +pa)  This excludes synonyms.  PA will not become Pennsylvania
• - (ex: car -hybrid) This excludes pages that contain hybrid
• “” (ex: “hey buddy”) This searches for the entire phrase and not 2 seperate kws
• * (ex: My * Blog) This is a wild card.  It matched My “anything” blog
• OR (ex: car red OR blue)  Searches for both car red AND car blue, but not car red blue.  MUST be in caps

In another post, I will explain some of the more advanced operators and show some of their uses.

So our objective is to get all of the comments that we have made noticed by google bot so we can pick up our sweet links.  If you simply post a comment, then there is a reasonable chance that search engines will never pick it up.  The solution is to gently guide the search engines to check out those links.  I’m going to give you a quick easy way to do this.  Please, be creative and try different ways to make this work for you.

1. First thing to do is to make a list of all of the pages that you made a comment on.  If you make a comment, and it goes through, save the link in a notepad document.

2. Now sign up for an account at Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog.  Now write a post that includes links to all of the comment pages that you saved.

3. Now sign up for an account at digg.com.  Now submit your wordpress or blogger post that has the links to digg.

That is all there is to it.  If all goes well your digg page will be indexed quickly.  It will spit google bot out at your free blog, and your blog will spit google out to all of the links that have your comments on them.  Now I’m not saying that this is a fool proof method or 100% successful.  This method can however be applied in a number of different ways boosting its effectivness.

Note:  Don’t use your own blog to post links to the comments you made.  You’ll be turning your 1 way links into recipricol links and screwing up the link weight.

• http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp
• http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx
• http://blo.gs/ping.php
• http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
• http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html

And don’t forget to sign up on technorati and claim your blog.  I got the links above from this link.  The above are the live links under submit blog and blog rss feeds that don’t require you to sign up to submit a url.  If you have the time, try all the links on the page, make accounts at all the sites and submit your RSS everywhere.

Although google may one day have a fast working facial recognition algorithm, that day has not yet come.  Because of that google relies heavily on what the webmaster says about the photos presented.  A smart webmaster can use this to their advantage.  To the best of my knowledge, google is looking at the name of the image file and “alternate text”.  This is why you should always RE-NAME your image files for SEO purposes.  I like to use the name of the person, and possibly one short descriptive term.  In the alternate text, I will then again mention the persons name and give a small caption about the pic.

I’m sure that other factors, such as the title of the page, contents of page, make a difference also, but you have to have the name and the alternate text right.  If you are uploading your own photos (hotlinking will get you no where),  then save them to a good name before uploading.  When you upload the image, make sure that you edit the “Image Caption” field.  This is also known as your alternate text.

You should be creative with your alternate text, trying to draw people in on longer keyphrases.  If you have the spare time, you may even want to go back through your old posts, and add alternate text.

Really what you are dealing with is “Free-speech” and it is a doubled edged sword to the blogger.  By allowing comments you allow interaction with readers and by allowing trackbacks you allow interaction with other blogs.  While this is all well and good, this interaction can often be a nuissance to big sites, but will rarely keep you tied up with a site that is growing.

Not only do I recommend that you allow comments, I suggest that you allow users to link back to their website.  Now I know that some are scratching their heads, saying “why would I allow a competitor to put a link on my site?”  Believe it or not, this will benefit you in the long run.  First, those blog owners who are in your niche and just starting out need links and they know it.  Because of that they are usually motivated to leave thoughtful relevant comments in hopes that the blog owner will allow it.  Getting a discussion going in comments is a good thing, and a good way to get someone to bookmark your site.  Sometimes they are not even interested in your site, but they are interested in seeing responses to their comments.  If you don’t allow users to link back to their site, you are repelling good comments.

If you are attracting blog owners who are leaving legitamate comments, then visit their site and do the same.

ADVANCED STRATEGY:

If  you know PHP or a scripting language, then you can automate this process.  Run a CRON job, that goes through your comments everyday saving urls from comments.  If the page is a blog, go to most recent post page and leave a comment saying:

“I enjoyed this post, great blog you have here.  Thanks for the visit to my site!”

or something stupid that has a good chance of getting through moderation.