This is actually a great way to see how your competition has scored some good PageRank. You can also try to get the same backlinks to your site and at least keep par, until you can figure out a way to surpass them.
Use the following search engine to figure out what backlinks are going to any site, whether it is your own or the competition's: www.backlinkwatch.com. This easy to use SEO tool allows you to see the people linking to you or any url, and more importantly, to see whether the link is a nofollow link. It even gives you the anchor text being used to link back to you. Use this on your own or on the competition to quickly size them up and start your own backlink campaign.
OFFER RSS FEEDS
Today's surfer is far more sophisticated than in the past. They not only surf for content through search engines but also RSS feeds. If you have constantly updating content, you can attract people who are searching the web for it quite easily.
Just offer an RSS feed that puts it all in one place for them. People take multiple RSS feeds and are able to read and search them in an RSS feed reader. This helps people locate content quickly that is recent and up-to-date. If you submit your RSS feeds, then many readers will link back to you.
PRESS RELEASES
If you've done something noteworthy, don't forget to toot your own horn. Send out press released with a backlink embedded back to your site. This offers you valuable publicity and keeps you front and center in the public's eye.
LATERAL LINKING
There are myriads of social networking sites out there that will allow you to add some lateral backlinks to your site. These are areas that are set up as community sites that can help build your PageRank, especially if you get good reviews from people because of them. Facebook and Myspace are great sites for networking and there's nothing wrong with discretely putting a backlink in your profile. YouTube is a great place to put up videos that attract people back to your profile page, where you've placed another backlink.
This strategy offers several benefits. First, social networking sites cater to a large audience of people. You can get quite a bit of exposure just setting up a profile and becoming part of the community. Secondly, they offer you the ability to get feedback on the offerings of your site.
This can help you to tweak your website so that it becomes more naturally popular. Finally, social networking sites are a great place to network and find more websites that might help you boost your rank by putting up a backlink, whether reciprocal or one-way.
There are three types of links, even if they're all coded the same: a reciprocal link, an outbound link, and a one-way inbound link. In the past, people would join link exchange sites to get reciprocal links. Now, the newer algorithms actually discount reciprocal links in favor of one-way inbound links. The trick then isn't just to get an inbound link that will count as a backlink (since a reciprocal link would then qualify), but to get an inbound link that is one-way only.
GOOD NEIGHBOR/BAD NEIGHBOR
To be clear, the algorithms used to determine good SERPs are not published. The information that is being presented is based on things that people tweaked and then used in a trial and error fashion to try to get good page ranking. If the algorithms were published, it would be a simple matter to fool the search engines and thus they would automatically lose their value.
So, the best way to understand the way the new algorithms work is to think of your site as a piece of real estate. On the Internet, you can buy a piece of real estate in cyberspace and it doesn't have an address until you have a domain name. This domain name is used to determine some of your page ranking and it also is important in identifying where you live and what you do.
However, even if we know that you live at www.myurl.com we still don't know anything else about you. We're thinking of doing business with you and maybe the sign on your door (your domain name) tells us what you sell, but it doesn't really tell us what kind of quality to expect from your business. The first thing we might do then, in this case, is to simply drive by your place of business and see what the neighborhood looks like and speaking to the neighbors.
In cyberspace, your neighbors are the people who backlink to you. Their PageRank is what the search engine already knows about your neighbors. The spider that crawls their sites begins to get an idea of who you are based on what your neighbors are saying about you on their web pages.
If they are quality people who are have something to do with the niche your business is in, then they are expected to be expert appraisers of your reputation. After they start talking about you, the way they promote you and what they say will determine whether we end up thinking your place of business is in a good neighborhood or whether you might be in a less desirable place of town.
THINK QUALITY, NOT VOLUME
Understanding this analogy, you begin to see that it isn't the number of neighbors you have, but the type of people you cultivate in your inner circle that makes the different. This can be confusing for new webmasters who think that they are given PageRank based on the number of links that come into their site.
That's really not correct. They attain a higher ranking based on the quality of the people they associate with and the neighborhood they frequent. So, a site with fewer backlinks can still beat one with a larger number of backlinks - if those links are the right type of link.
In a way, this can make your job easier. You don't have to fret about whether you have fifty or five hundred links, as long as you are getting links that are raising your reputation by default. Eventually, those people tell their friends and your reputation begins to grow - and, in the right neighborhood!
So take care when establishing backlinks. There is really no sense in wasting your time on getting links from sites that aren't popular.
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