How To Beat Your Competition In The Search Engines

I’m sure that you’ve downloaded and read my free book on SEO, The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO. In it, I discuss a strategy to beat your competition by looking at who links to them and getting those same links yourself.

I’d like to explain how it works.

The basic steps are:

1. Find out who is beating you in the search engines now.
2. Find out who is linking to those sites.
3. Find out how to get those same links to your own site.

Step One
I’m going to assume that you know what your keywords are. You can repeat this step for each of your keywords if you have multiples, but I’ll describe the process for only one keyword in this article.

Do a search for your keyword. Note the top 10 results. Write down (or copy and paste) each URL in the top 10 results. These are your competitors that you will try to beat.

Step Two
Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. You don’t have to log in unless you are working on your own sites. Up at the top of the page, there’s an input field with a button to “Explore URL”. Don’t put it in the “My Sites” input.

You have a list of 10 URLs from step one. Put in the first URL and hit the “Explore URL” button. This will return a list of all of the pages of the site you are exploring.

Remember that this is just what Yahoo has in it’s index and may or may not be accurate. It seems to be more accurate than the information that Google gives you, but it’s not perfect. It is not absolute truth, only a reasonable facsimile.

The first response is a list of all of the pages that exist on the site you are exploring. Keep in mind that this is according to Yahoo, not absolute truth.

Click on the button to the right of pages that says “inlinks”. This will display all links, from all places, to only the URL you are exploring.

I prefer to limit the number of links displayed to “Except from this domain”. That will not show you any links from any page at the domain name of the site you are exploring.

There’s some nuance here because technically, “www.walton.com” is a different site than “shops.walton.com”. Same domain name, but different sites. I really want to know how well the entire domain is doing, so I don’t care about what subdomain, (that’s the “www” vs. “shops” in my example) that links are pointing at. I want to exclude them all. I only want to see links from other people’s sites, not links from the site I’m exploring.

I also want to know how many links go to the “Entire Site”. There may be links to specific pages or blog posts or special pages. Most links go to the home page, but not all. I want to see all links to any page on this entire site.

You should have changed the first drop down menu to “Except from this domain” and the second drop down to “Entire site.” When you make those changes, it should refresh and display according to the new settings.

This will give you a list of up to 1,000 places that link to the site at the URL you put in.

Step Three
Look at them. Ponder them. Click through to the next page and the next page. Click on some of the links.

This is the hard part. You’ll have to be part Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Your goal is to figure out who is linking to this site and then find out how you can get them to link to you to.

Some questions you might ask while reviewing this list are:

• Are there a lot of links from the same site?
• Are the sites that link here related to the same keyword?
• Are there links from sites that obviously have nothing to do with the keyword?
• Are there any blogs that you can leave comments on?
• Are their any forums that you can leave comments on?
• Is the owner of this site (your competition) leaving comments on other’s sites?
• Are there links from directories or places that you can formally request links from?
• Are their links from article sites?
• Are there links that you can easily reproduce?

If you see a bunch of links from comments on other sites, then you know that you have to target those sites for your own comments.

If there are directories, you need to ask to be added to those directories too.

If there are links from article sites, then you need to write some articles.

A good, healthy set of links should be from random sites that are related to the keyword, but are just genuinely honest links because the other person liked what this site had to say.

If you write good content and people read it, they will link to your site too. Leave a comment on their site and build a relationship with them. They’ll check out your site and probably link to it.

If you are doing the social media thing, people should be twittering and facebooking your content. If this site is doing that, has great content and is social, then you’re even, because you have great content and you’re social too, right?

If that’s the case, get to know the sites that are linking to your competitors. Leave comments and get to know the people behind those sites. Reach out, be nice, be helpful, and get to know people, specifically the people that are linking to your competitors.

The Balance
The balance that you have to strike here is between being completely nice and goodhearted, innocently out to help make the world be a better place, and on the other hand, being a money grubbing, greedy pig.

You need to help make the world be a better place. I’m going to assume that when you sell your product to someone that makes the world a better place, or why are you selling it?

Leading with the kind heart and the helpful hand, you need to keep in the back of your mind the target of your competition. Yes, you should be nice, but you should also target those specific people that are helping your competition.

Rinse. Repeat.
Once you review the lists of links for each of the 10 URLs for this keyword, you should spend time, (every day!), working on getting links from each of those places. You have up to a thousand URLs for each of 10 keywords, so you have ten thousand places to get links from.

Start at the top and work your way down. When you get to the bottom, repeat.

Do that until you have so many quality links that your site is listed above your competition in the search engine results pages. Build the links, then build more links.

By that time, the world will be a much better place, because they’ve been buying your products instead of your competition’s, and you will have more money to increase your business even more.

What could be better than that?

If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Thanks!