As far as search engine rankings are concerned, let me make it clear at the outset that incoming links is what really matters. As long as you have sufficient number of high quality keyword/keyterm targeted incoming links to your website, you will be able to outrank anybody for that particular keyword or term. If I could summarize this post in one sentence then I would say your key takeaway from reading this is to understand that incoming links is fundamental to your site rankings. Put your efforts and time (money as well) to get as many links and deep links (both targeted and otherwise) to your website as possible.

Anybody telling you any different is talking through their hat or trying to sell you that expensive SEO On Page optimization service. Basically what this means is that even if you have a website that is completely developed using let’s say “Flash” or is the next Javascript showcase you don’t have to despair. Depending on the niche you can very well rank number one provided you have enough number of links pointing back to your website.

I briefly mentioned in my previous post on the characteristics of the perfect link. While a perfect link is most sought after, it should be done in moderation. After all you want your incoming links to be as natural as possible. This means that you should strive to get all types of links back to you, yes even the crappy ones. The following are some points to keep in mind when you are out there buying requesting for incoming links. 

1. Get links from contextually relevant domains.
2. Get links from not so relevant domains. 
3. Do not get link that only point to your main page. A healthy mix of deep links is very important.
4. Get a healthy mix of links that have your keyword / term as the anchor text.
5. Vary the anchor text phrase. Try to include your main keyword but vary the text to be different.
6. Get a lot of links that don’t have your keyword but have a variety of unrelated keywords as the anchor text such as the domain name, your name and even keywords like “click here”, “here”, “site” and “this”.
7. Links that are part of the content will have more juice. Try and get these.
8. Site wide links also help a lot. Remember we are building links and natural links. Not every link can be part of the content. So go ahead and try to get a few site wide links. The best natural way would be to build a widget or sponsor a theme.
9. Try to get links from different sources. Do not concentrate on one particular source. Work them all. Directories, forums, blog comments, blog roll, social networking all help to build a healthy mix.

A word of caution, buying links is frowned upon by Google and they will negate any link juice from links that are obviously paid for. So far I haven’t heard of any website being banned for buying links. On the other hand selling links is a dangerous practise and must be avoided at all cost. Buying links is a tricky exercise and if done right Google cannot prove otherwise and cannot penalize you. This is the main reason why Google has thus far abstained from slapping those sites that have bought links with a penalty like they did some time back to all those websites selling links.

As a good SEO consultant I must tell you to avoid buying links or at the very least avoid the obvious buying link tactics. Remember folks when you get to that coveted first page of Google, it’s not just potential searchers that will see you there. Your competition will be all over your website trying to decipher how you managed the feat. Infact, you can bet your last dollar that your competition will be analyzing your web pages and incoming links with a microscope. If you have gone about link building in an amateur manner then the quickest way to get your ranking yanked is for your competition to report your website to Google for buying links.

There is so much you can learn from your competition. Let me digress a bit, I’ve been referring to an interesting SEO contest that has been going on for a while now and quite a few websites and blogs are trying their best to reach the top. Everyday I see one website or the other moving up, down or getting sandboxed completely. This contest gives one the perfect opportunity to analyze and better understand how Google and its algorithm works. Since quite a few websites are in contention, each are following different strategies and this gives you a good insight on what is working and what is not working with Google. I’ve been keenly following the rankings and making notes whenever I see a particular site doing well and moving up the rankings. I try and analyze the cause and note that down for my benefit. If you are a budding SEO I would suggest you do the same. The two websites that I initially picked have seemingly dropped out of contention with the bloggers not persisting enough particularly when all the hard work was done, the sites were sandboxed for a while and were making a comeback in the rankings when the respective owners decided to give up. A real pity. One of my current favorites is sandboxed at the moment for the term Asia’h Epperson but so far has done everything I would do from an On Page Optimization perspective. Infact I do not even know if this website is a real fan site or is someone trying to win the contest.

I think I’ve digressed enough. Back to incoming links and link building campaigns. You need to be aware of the consequences of a poorly managed link building campaign especially if you are building a lasting online business. Link building is an art and best left to people who understand it. Dig a little and you will find many many forums littered with people selling links on crappy blogs and link farms. While these at first glance seem really cheap and tempting, you should carefully judge what you are getting into. Simple question to ask yourself is if your links will pass a manual review. Link building is a time consuming affair. You have to do it right and should last the test of time and manual reviews. This is where a good SEO Services firm brings a lot to the table. (Yes I’m shamelessly plugging for myself). I hope you realize that anybody can get links. Simply head over to Digital point and you can easily get a few thousand incoming links for less than $100. Running the perfect link campaign is a different ball game altogether and hopefully you realize that.

Does this mean that you don’t need to care about On Page Optimization? No you do, especially if you are in a highly competitive niche. Why? If you are in a highly competitive niche then the chances are your competitor is spending an equal or more amount of time, effort and money in trying to match and even beat you in the number of incoming links. This is where optimizing your website will help.

On Page optimization is a topic that I plan to talk about another day. So don’t forget to bookmark this blog and come back for more SEO tips.
 

If you are beginning to learn or getting interested in search engine optimization, chances are you are trying to beat your competitors ranking and in the process take over his spot. Whatever is your motive, in the SEO world analyzing your competitors back links is something you will find yourself doing quite a lot. While there are more sophisticated and automated tools available that greatly reduce the amount of manual work and will most definitely have to be part of your SEO arsenal, lets for now look at how you would research a competitor back links without using a paid tool.

First and foremost is the keyword. Understanding keywords is a whole chapter in itself and best left for another day. For the sake of this post I’m assuming that you know your targeted keyword. Let’s go one better and look at the contest that I talked about in my previous post. Here we know that the keyword is Asia’h Epperson. The goal of the contest is to rank as high as you can for the term “Asia’h Epperson”. While there are many that are trying their hand in the contest, in my previous post I highlighted the two sites that I believe are doing the best. Let’s do a little research by looking at one the top two in contention.

First thing you will need is SEOQuake. Yes I know we said no tools in the beginning but this one is free and sure saves some time. Download it from here and set it up on your browser. I’ve tested it on my Firefox and it works just great. Once you’ve done that our next stop is to go to Yahoo’s SiteExplorer.

Type in your competitor’s website url and hit “Explore URL”. Yahoo comes back with 2 sets of results. The first of results is all the pages from the website itself that Yahoo has in its index and the second is all the incoming links to the website in question. Look at the screenshot below that I’ve taken of one of the contenders for the Asia’h Epperson SEO contest to show things more clearly. After all, a picture speaks a thousand words.

Look at the first rounded rectangle highlighted in red. This gives me the total number of pages that Yahoo has indexed. By default it groups all the sub domains and gives you the total number. If you want to eliminate all the sub domains then simply click on the “Only this domain” link in the second higlighted rectangle.

So what does this tell me? 19 pages is really not bad for a website that started sometime in March. It tells me that the author is quite active which is always good from an SEO perspective. The bots love fresh content and the more you add content to your website the more they will visit you.

Lets proceed to look at the second part of the results. Right next to the first rounded rectangle you have a link that says ” Inlinks (5264)”. What does this mean? Yahoo is telling you that it has found 5264 incoming links to the website. Again by default Yahoo counts incoming links to the complete website including subdomains and internal links from the website itself. To see more details click on the inlinks link. I’ve once again attached a screenshot to make things more clear.

On clicking the “inlinks” link, Yahoo will display all the incoming links to the website. This is great because now you can see exactly where your competitor is getting his or her links from. If you have SEOQuake installed you will also get to see additional information that will tell you in a glance how strong the incoming links are. The red colored rounded rectangle bars in the above screenshot show you the output from SEOQuake. This is where SEOQuake is a timesaver. You can sort the entire results by PageRank or any other metric that SEOQuake allows you and all the results are sorted accordingly. I’ve sorted the results by PageRank and can see the highest PR on the link is PR6. I can now categorize these and then explore further to see the exact nature of the link.

Before you go about doing this make sure you apply these two filters.

1.  Remove links from the same website.
2. Set to show incoming links to the entire website.

Doing this should help to clear up the results and you can begin your digging in earnest. Sort by PageRank and check each link to find out the exact nature of the link. Now before someone points this out in the comments let me say that Yes, I do know that visible PageRank is not the all and end all.  But for a backlink analysis the worst case is some of the pages increase in authority and rank and the best case is the exact opposite.

While it is relatively easy to spot PageRank, spotting authority is a little more difficult. Just think of an authority site as a site that is trusted by Google. Google ranks such sites very high on the SERP’s. (Search Engine Result Pages) You can rank very high for your main keywords (primary niche) and for totally unrelated keywords and phrases as well.

Looking back at the contest, the site that everyone is trying to beat has a solid back link from Griz’s make money for beginners blog. This is probably the biggest factor that is still keeping Griz’s Asia’h Epperson site stuck like glue on second spot in Google.

Let me give you an idea of the kind of authority Griz’s money making site has. Recently Victor Franqui, one of the few bloggers that talks sense when it comes to making money online called out Caroline Middlebrook and questioned her knowledge and experience. ( Be advised the language in the video is a little graphic. Not safe while at work or in front of kids )

Anyway to cut a long story short, in the video Vic promises Caroline Middlebrook that he will overtake Caroline on the SERP’s for the term “Caroline Middlebrook”. Now I’ve got to believe Vic when he says something like that. I’m pretty sure he will follow up and actually do something about it.

Soon after Griz gives Vic the perfect link, the right anchor text and everything. Funnily enough, that post from Griz is now on page 1 in Google for Caroline Middlebrook. One single post from Griz on his make money blog is all it took and Griz wasn’t even trying. Today if you search for Caroline Middlebrook on Google you will find Griz’s site ahead of Vic’s, on the first page, ranked 4th or 5th when I last checked. Again guys, a single post from Griz and he makes the first page on Google. That shows some serious authority.

Boy I’ve really digressed now. Back to the SEO contest and the research we were doing. Once you have the incoming links sorted by PR, look a little deeper at the sites. Find out the following

1. What is the Anchor Text?
2. Is the site content related to the keyword in question?
3. Is it a sitewide link? (Is it on the sidebar or footer that is common throughout the website)
4. If the link is not sitewide, check if the link is part of the content?
5. Evaluate the link neighborhood?

Here is a tip guys. The best kind of link that you can possibly get is from a virgin authority site using the right anchor and title text with the link buried as part of the content. The perfect link. Period!!

Now these tasks will cost you time. This is where having something like SEOElite comes in handy. But then SEOElite is a beast that is also best left for another day. Folks I’m going to end this post here. This is way too long already. I will continue in my next post. Do come back and keep reading SEOBlogPro.com for more SEO and related tips.

Grizzly Bears or more popularly known as Griz recently challenged his blog readers to out rank him for a particular keyword (Asia’h Epperson) on Google. Griz is doing this to gauge how far his readers have come along since he started writing his blog. Griz has been for some time giving out some great tips on making money by targetting organic visitors and understanding SEO is one of the basic skills you need to succeed in landing more and more organic traffic. Griz is one of the better bloggers out there that is as adept at SEO as he is in money making. Hs blog makes for fantastic reading and is quite a contrast to many of the so called A list bloggers.

A little more about the challenge. The challenge or the goal is to rank better than one of Griz’s own website for the keyword Asia’h Epperson. Griz has been consistently ranked number 2 on Google for a long long time. It’s been nearly a month after Griz posted this contest and he still continues to holds that position.

See the attached screenshot below. The result marked in yellow is Griz’s website that everyone is trying to beat.

So what does the winner get? Apart from of course learning in the process (Griz’s way of shaking them into action) the winner gets $500 from Griz. I must say this is quite generous of Griz and shows genuine interest in helping out his readers. There has been a fair amount of interest in the competition though not on the same level as this one that played out sometime back but then again that was of a different scale altogether with the motives and the participation quite different from this one.

If you are curious of how everyone is doing, I did take a look at the search results in Google today. So far I can see only two real competitors so to speak that have made some good ground. Both have put in quite a lot of work, each of the two have different approaches and are currently on the first page on Google. Google in all probability will keep changing this around until it figures out which one is more relevant.

See the screen shot below. I’ve again marked in yellow the two front runners poised to take over from Griz.

It remains to be seen if we will indeed see either one of the two or a new one take the second spot and the prize. While this is great fun to watch, it is also a great learning exercise. Let’s look at the two challengers in more detail and by doing so learn more about their approach and a little about SEO itself. So do come back for more insights and SEO tips and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed.