Link Building and Backlinking
Image by ivanpw via Flickr
Links are the lifeblood of the internet, they just keep everything pumping back and forth, round and round, so if you want a successful website which ranks higher than those of your competitors helping you to bring in the bucks, then links are a one-word answer to your dilemma. If your competitive intelligence is searching for the way that you can get the competitive edge on your competitors, then study their linking habits.
Competitive intelligence using backlink research is vital, you need to drill far below the surface of your competitors backlink profile and find out all about;
- Types of backlinks – what makes up the majority of their backlinks. Are they links from directories, forums, industry sites? Are these backlinks specific to pages or cover the entire site. What is the percentage of their links which are “dofollow” as opposed to “nofollow”.
- Anchor text distribution – another important competitive intelligence issue. How many of the links which do point to their website have specific keyword phrases for the link text?
- Backlink distribution – what you need to assess is which page of your competitors website has the largest number of incoming backlinks, and what average crawl rate does this page have? Compare this valuable data with the data you already have (or should have) for your own top pages.
- Distribution of domains – who is clicking these links? How many of these links are from differentiated IP addresses and what percentage of them come from different C-class subnets? Compare this information with the info you have for your own website.
Here’s the bottom line
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Just kidding, this is the bottom line – if your competitive intelligence confirms that your competitor is beating you and outranking you using the same target keywords then the chances are that they have more backlinks, and that their backlinks are better than yours.
