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.

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.

On Technorati pages, they now have what they call “Blog Reactions.”  A blog reaction occurs when any blog links to another blog.  The short of it is, the more blog posts you make with blog links in them, the more pages that your link will show up in at technorati.

So if you make a a blog post and put a link to thisblog.com, you will show up under blog reactions on thisblog.com’s technorati page.

When you just get started, you want to get indexed and start building links as soon as you can.  If you claim your blog on technorati and then post with links to other blogs, then you can get a strong start with several links.

Apply this method with blog commenting, digg submissions, article submissions, etc. and you’ll get off to a very nice start.

P.S.  I don’t know if you can take this overboard or not, and I’m not sure how much weight a link from technorati gives you.  Any link is a good link for a new site.  I will do some research on this and let everyone know.

If you are just starting out and looking for blogs to post on, you will probably notice that many of those blogs use no follow tags for comments.  Don’t let this deter you from posting a comment.  Scouring through all the blogs trying to find ones that don’t use the no follow tags is a waste of time.  You are better off making comments on each and every blog that you come to that allows a link.

If you watch your logs, you will notice that google bot will show up on your page and the referring link will be from one of your no follow comments.  There is no doubt or argument that google follows these links.  What is arguable is that the no follow links may not carry as much weight.

Although many experts still contend that there is value in the no follow tags, Matt Cutts has publicly stated that webmasters should take down their no follow tags.  Although he hasn’t actually said it, I don’t think the difference between a no follow link and a regular link is substatial.

Just as an easy example, lets say you write an article about the death of “Popstar X”.  Because there will be tons of competition in the form of other blogs writing on the same topic, you need to be picky about your title.

“Pop-Star X Dies” – is not going to work.

“Legendary Performer Pop-Star X dies suddenly” – is much better.

Because the big sites will pick up the traffic for “Pop-Star X”, you need to include interesting and relevant keywords in your title to pick up some search engine traffic.  Also, if the news is breaking, vary the title more drastically and get your post up ASAP.  There is some value in getting your post indexed first.

In general, because your site is small whenever you go for a keyword try to think about what terms you can add to make the kw more specific but still relevant.

Also, if you have All-in-1 SEO installed, then your tags are also marked as meta-keywords.  If you have a unique take on some breaking news, make sure that you use the tags to your advantage.

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For this technique you need an existing site, hopefully a blog to use (some of this will work without an existing site – keep reading).  It is really not that difficult, but I classify it as an intermediate technique because you have to already have a site.

An existing blog works perfect for this because the front page is constantly changing, and constantly getting crawled by search engines.  To make this work, in step 3 in the last post you compile a list of 5-10 blogs that you can comment on.   Now what you want to do is save all of the urls from the pages that you commented on.  You can also click on the comments page and get that seperate url.  If you want to be really sneaky, grab the RSS feeds from the comments and save urls from those.

If you have a blog and you don’t care about a shameless out of place post, then write a post that has hyperlinks to all the pages (not the feeds)  that you want indexed, and add your new site to the blog roll.  If you have a respectible site, then add your site to the the blog roll, and add the links discretely to the blog roll also.  The idea is to get the pages that you want indexed and followed on the front page of your blog.  Keep the link to your new site in the blogroll so it stays on your page for a while.  Delete the links to the comment pages off your blog roll, or delete the post that you put them in after a week.

You can do this part without an existing blog.  Do this at your own risk…

Now what to do with those RSS feeds?  I don’t think anyone would mind if you used a ping service on the feed.  I don’t want you to abuse any one service, so just search for “blog ping” and use something that comes up.  Don’t go abusing the servers because you can get your ip banned for exessive use.  Send 5 out over 5 different servers, wait 20 mins and send the last 5 out and you should be fine.

We will use a 3 step approach to getting indexed quickly.  You should already have your blog set up for SEO and need to have 2 plugins installed:  Google XML Sitemap and MetaBlogPress Ping Optimizer.  If that is not done then read this first.

1.  Compile a sitemap with the Google XML plugin.  Then, start an account at Google Webmaster Tools.  You can use your gmail login if you have a gmail account.  After you login, click add a new site.

To verify using a Meta-Tag is easy.  Copy the tag that google gives you.  Go to WP-Admin, then settings, then All-in-one SEO.  At the bottom, paste the google Meta-Tag in “additional home headers” and update the info.  Click verify on Google Webmaster Tools and you are done!!

Now we need to tell google about your sitemap.  On Google WT click on Site Configuration and then Sitemaps.  When you are on that page, click on Submit a sitemap.  Now in the box that comes up after yourdomain.com/ type in sitemap.xml and click submit.  Now we are done with that.

2.  Next we are going to use the power of Digg.com.  Start an account with Digg, and write a page about one of your posts.  Although you may never get traffic from Digg, their pages are indexed very fast and if everything goes correct, the Digg page with your link on it will also be indexed fast, pointing google’s little spider right to your blog.  You may also want to claim your blog at Technorati, set up a Squido-Lens, or start a profile on a social networking site and leave a link for your blog.

3.  Now we are going to have to use our brains on this one.  Think about what terms people may use to get to your blog.  Search for blogs similar to yours that are popular.  Compile a list of 5-10.  Now everyday for the next few days, you are going to post a comment on all of those blogs linking back to your website.

That is about it.  You also want to write one or two posts a day to get your RSS feed noticed.