THIS IS STEP BY STEP SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
PAGE 48 TO 50 CHAPTER 7
As an example of competitive link building, you can go to www.moz.com to use their Open Site Explorer tool under the Research Tools section. Just enter the URL of one of your competitors into the toolbar to find out who is linking to their website. This tool is free to use and can provide some great information about potential linking opportunities.
Moz will provide you with a list of sites linking to whatever website you put into their tool, which you can then download into an Excel spreadsheet for your records.
Once you download the Excel report, you’ll be able to view websites that are linking to your competition and would therefore potentially be willing to link to your site as well.
Now that you have a list of sites that may be interested in linking to you, it’s time to reach out to the site owners and make your request. In order to do this, you’ll need to find an administrative contact for the website, so I’d like to share a secret for a very effective way to find most website owners. Simply go to http://www.whois.com/whois/ and type in the website you’re trying to contact. WHOIS is a great resource that provides contact details for just about every website, as long as it hasn’t been privately registered. This can definitely be an invaluable resource when attempting to do outreach for link-building purposes.
Here’s a typical e-mail I use to ask for a link from the site owner:
Hi,
I came across your site when doing a Google search and was really impressed. I actually represent a site that (list what your business does here). Therefore, I was hoping you’d consider including it as a resource for your audience as well. The website is nameofsite.com, and I think your audience will find it to be very useful. If you need any further details, I’d be happy to provide them to you. Please just let me know, and thanks for your time.
Regards,
Your Name
In this regard, Buzz Stream (which is mentioned earlier in this chapter) can be a great tool to help automate some of your link outreach efforts. If you don’t ask for a link, you won’t get a link. I’ll warn you that this process can be fairly tedious, and the response rate will vary depending on the type of business you’re in and how competitive it is. Keep those expectations in mind. The quality of the links can be strong, but the process can be limiting based on how manual and tedious this type of outreach tends to be. I recommend reaching out to the websites that have the best potential for you to acquire links in order to make the most efficient use of your time.
At this point, I would like to state again that while there is extensive detail provided in this book about how to leverage the tools of Moz to effectively execute various SEO tactics, this is not the only resource out there. I’ve focused on Moz specifically because the tools provided by this company have emerged as some of the best and most respected in the SEO space to date. Furthermore, Moz is an all-inclusive resource to assist with nearly every aspect related to search engine optimization.
With that being said, the world of SEO is very fluid and constantly evolving. Therefore, the strategies outlined in this chapter and others have been designed to show you how to effectively use these resources for the purpose of getting more website traffic. Moz is in no way the only provider offering these kinds of tools to help manage an effective SEO campaign. My goal is to provide you with specific examples and knowledge of how these tools work so you can then use these and similar tools to create the results you want. So feel free to experiment with the various tools that are outlined in this book so that you can find the resources that work best for your personal working style and goals.
With these resources at your disposal, it’s only a matter of getting familiarized with the techniques. Once you do that, you’ll be a link-acquiring machine. You’ll have a huge advantage over the competition, increasing both your search rankings and relevance for the terms for which you are attempting to rank. The increase in links you acquire will be a huge driver in improving your search rankings.
Let’s see your competitors keep up with you when you apply all of these newfound strategies!
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