Building on Your Competitor's Links

Recently Google announced a change in Flash indexing. Unfortunately despite this change, there is a long way to go. Link building is by far the most effective way of increasing your ranking with the search engines. How many links you have to your site is sort of a "grade" of how popular your site is. The quality of those links is important, so how do you find out what types of links to get?

The Link Discovery Formula
To find where you should build links, you should look at your competitors. To do this:

1. Do a keyword search for a company like yours. For example, we just built a site for Play and Learn Family Daycare, so we might put in "daycare torrance".
2. Look at the results that come up, and choose a business on the first page that is similar to your own. It does not have to be in your city, just a similar type of business. In this case we chose Sound of Music Preschool.
3. Using the URL for the business you chose, use the following formula and type into Google: "+www.soundomusic.+com" -site:soundomusic.com. Type it exactly the same, with quotes and +/- signs. This formula will show you all the pages that have a link TO this company's website.
4. This preschool has 108 links to its site.

Building Your Link List
Now start looking through the list of links. Ask yourself the following:

• Are any of them places where you could get links as well?
• Do any of them give you ideas of other places you could get links (i.e. They are in the Yahoo business directory and you know Google has one of those too)
• Are there phrases you could use to search in Google to find more of these types of links?

Go Get Your Links
Now put together a plan for working through your link list, and obtain those links! Dedicate a time each day or each week towards obtaining these links. Also consider using social networking methods for increasing your links organically.

You should run through this process several times with different keyword searches and looking at various companies. This is an excellent project to implement over several months, and you can see very quickly you can obtain high-quality links to help with your search engine rankings.