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Go to that web page at Yahoo. You probably have to log in with your Yahoo ID. Make one up if you have to because this page is more powerful than any other for getting links to your site.
Here’s how to build traffic to your site. The strategy is to find out who is getting the traffic for your keywords now, essentially, your competitors. Next, find out who is linking to them. Last, get those people to link to you too.
Step One
Do a search for the keyword that you want to be found for. If there are a few variations, try them all. Note who comes up on the front page. By “note”, I mean actually write them down on a piece of paper or write them into a text file. You want to know their name and their URL. Do this for all of the keywords and review who comes up the most.
Step Two
Use the Site Explorer at Yahoo to find out who is linking to them. Their could be thousands of links and you may not want to write them all down. You can export the first thousand results to a TSV file.
Type in their URL. Browse through their inbound links. Make sure that the settings at the top of the page are for “From All Pages” and to “Entire Site”. That’s all links from anywhere out there to anywhere on the site.
Now, you’ll have to use some thought while you review these links. How many are there? Are there ways to group them? Are there a lot on a few sites or a few from a lot of sites? Are they from his cousin or from real web sites? Browse through them all, trying to see if there’s any sense of order to them. Click on a few links to see where they are located in the remote site. Are they in a sidebar of a site with thousands of pages generating thousands of links from one site?
Step Three
Do you remember in high school when you wanted to be friends with the cool kids, but you weren't cool?
First, you have to find out who these people are. Whoever put a link to your competitor’s site is now a target for friendship. You want to find out why they put that link there. What are they interested in? What is their point of view? Do they have a blog? Is there any way to comment on their site? Do they publish a lot of content? Are they really one of the cool kids or are they posers?
Now, if they blog, read some of their posts and leave a comment, agreeing or disagreeing or adding some information. You don’t want to be obvious. You don’t want to come off as needy or desperate like you did in high school. You want to be cool too, so act cool. Have a conversation with them somehow. Post a few more comments over the next week.
You might want to write down a list of “high value targets”, which would be sites that probably will link to you because they seem to like the same stuff that you do.
Write a blog post on your site that mentions them and link to them. If you both use WordPress, you might get a “pingback” link on their site.
Be methodical about who you leave comments on and how often, not too many and not too often, but consistently and appropriately. As you leave comments, they will check out your site and might leave comments back on yours. That’s a budding friendship. Nuture it. This is more about social skills than about technical skills.
As you comment and get comments back, you might send an email directly and start a conversation about something. Follow whatever you find and work it. Get to know people. Build that relationship. Link to them from your site. Ask them for a link exchange. They might do it without asking.
Woah! Dude! Did you just see what happened there? Friendship, conversation, social interaction, relationship, and INBOUND LINKS!
As you build up friendships, relationships, you are helping them and they are helping you. SEO loves the links. It seems to be the most powerful factor for gaining search results page ranking.
So, go use Site Explorer to target people to be your friends and build those links, social links, as well as web page links.