**by Eric Enge**
One of the most common recommendations people make about link
building is to find out who links to your competitors (aka backlinking
your competitors). This is a great idea, but many people who do this
miss the most important point of why you do it. Let's explore the good
things you can do while backlinking, and then dig into where the most
value lies.
*Contacting people who link to your competitors*
A common strategy is to develop a list of sites who link to your
competitor, and then contact those sites and ask them to link to you.
There are many programs that will help you develop such a list. Some
of the most interesting ones are Linkscape <http://www.linkscape.com>
, Majestic SEO <http://www.majesticseo.com>
, and Link Diagnosis <http://www.linkdiagnosis.com>
.
Link Diagnosis is free, and the other two cost a modest amount of
money. Link Diagnosis extracts link data using the Yahoo! API, and
Linkscape and Majestic SEO assemble their data based on independent
crawls of the web. As a result, in return for the fees they charge,
Linkscape and Majestic SEO can offer more functionality and depth of
data.
Once this data is assembled, the next step is to prioritize the
sites. Using metrics such as PageRank (SEOmoz also offers mozRank and
mozTrust), you can get an approximation of which sites are providing
the most important links to the competitor. However, you do want to
get a bit deeper into the analysis, because relevance is an important
factor as well. In fact, even if a linking page has relatively low
PageRank, but it is relevant to your site, you really don't want to
overlook it.
Once you have settled on a prioritization you now need to figure out
who to contact to request the link. Do not use scraper software to do
this for you. Scraping contact information off the web is a violation
of the CAN-SPAM Act
<http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm>
, and the punishment is not a fine (it is time in jail). Equally bad
is the fact that scrapers will frequently come up with the wrong
contacts.
Use inexpensive human resources to do this work for you. They can be
trained to recognize the right contact information, and they can also
assess the relevance of the link for you as well. This relevance data
is a key to the refining your prioritization of your link targets,
because relevance is a big factor in a link's value.
Once you have this data you can begin mailing people and asking for
links. An important part of this is crafting a message that will be
well received by the recipient. The key is to remember that they
probably did not wake up this morning thinking about what links they
were going to add to the page you are interested in, and they
certainly were not expecting to hear from you. In essence, you are
interrupting them. Be respectful, and you will be far better off.
*The problem*
Contacting sites that link to your competitor, as we noted above, is
a great idea. You should do it. However, it is an expensive manual
process that takes a long time to produce benefits. And what is your
success rate likely to be? If you run a really successful campaign:
about ten percent. So the real problem with making this your link
building strategy is that it is not enough to help you achieve your
goal (unless your goal is to have a site that is worth 10% of your
competitor's site).
This is a common link building mistake: not putting in a place a plan
that will have enough impact to achieve the goals of the business. For
example, if your competitor has 20,000 links, and you have 10,000
links of similar quality, putting in place a plan to obtain 500 new
links of similar quality is not enough. Of course, if 100 of those
links are of much higher quality, that is a different matter
altogether.
*The biggest value of backlinking*
When you analyze your competitor's backlinks there is a tremendous
amount of information made available to you. Dig into the nature of
the sites linking to them. In the process we outlined above,
understanding the relevance of the sites that link to your competitors
is really valuable. But you should look to expand upon that. Have your
researcher take the time to define the relevance in detail. Have them
answer the question: why did this site link to your competitor?
Is it because of a particular piece of content on the competitor's
site? A special promotional program? Are a lot of links coming from
one market sector? Are there related market sectors linking to them
that you would not have suspected? What areas of the market do you
think might be a good target that are not strongly featured in your
competitors' backlink profiles?
Like any other form of marketing, successful link building requires
an ongoing process of brainstorming ideas for improving existing
campaigns and coming up with new ones. Your (successful) competitors'
backlinks can be a treasure trove of ideas for link building
strategies. I have done this many times and am continually surprised
at the novel ideas that leading competitors come up with. But, they
are smart. That is how they became a leading competitor. So why not
put their brains to work for you?
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the author, and not
necessarily Search Engine Land.
Eric Enge <http://searchengineland.com/author/eric-enge/>
is the president of Stone Temple Consulting
<http://www.stonetemple.com>
, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of
Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide
<http://www.customsearchguide.com>
.
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