1 Way To Beat Your Online Competitors

Many factors are taken into consideration when the search engines; the major ones being Google, Yahoo and MSN rank your website.

One of the most influencing factor are back links.

What Are Back Links?

A back link is when a website links to you. One link from a website to your website is like a vote, and a lot like competition polls, the more votes you get the higher you appear in the result tables, in this case the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Where Can I Get Back Links From?

This will be covered later on in more detail however the aim is to obtain links from websites that have been around for 5, 6, 7 years; really trusted domain names, possibly links from universities, libraries and government departments, even though obtaining links from places like is difficult to achieve.

OK Where Do I Start?

Start with your competitors. OK lets say i own a Flower Shop and i have just published my sparkling new website, but now i need to generate traffic to my site and increase the presence of it in the search engines.

One of the places to start is your competitors.

A quick search for ‘flower delivery’ in Google reveals that the number 1 position is: http://www.serenataflowers.com/.

: Number 1 For Flower Delivery

To see who is linking to http://www.serenataflowers.com/ (voting for this website) simply type the following command into Google: -

‘link:http://www.serenataflowers.com’

Don’t just rely on Google, use the same command for MSN and Yahoo. MSN and Yahoo will display alot more back-links than Google. You should use the results for good research, competitor analysis and for generating ideas on how you can obtain links too.

Here you can see that http://www.serenataflowers.com/ has 242 linking to it.

: Back links for Flower Website

As you can see one of the back links is from: http://www.marketmarks.com/gifts/help.html.

This is a website about Online Gifts and they offer a link exchange if you link back to them, this is known as reciprocal linking, but nevertheless is one way to get links to your website.

A simple search for ‘flower directory’ displays a list of directories for ‘flower’ related websites where the opportunity to add a link back to your website is given, this is known as directory submission and i will be expanding on this very soon.

Once you have discovered who is linking to your competitors, find out exactly how this occured. Perhaps some evolved from a blog talking about news articles or some of the links may have came from a product or service testimonial (Using Testimonials For Website Visitor Conversion).

Your chances of successfully obtaining links are improved when you know exactly why other websites are linking to your competitors.

Furthermore you will also know what approach to use when contacting people to obtain links.

What Should I Say?

Well you may have written an interesting article about product ‘X’ and the website you want a link from may sell this product. You could drop them an email and explain how this article is related to their products and it would be worthwhile linking to it as it offers ‘X’ for your readers - would you consider liking to this?.