Increase Rankings By Spying On Your Competitor’s Links

If you want to increase rankings for your website, spying on your competitor’s links might be just the SEO boost you need. When you know who links to your competitors, you know where you can pursue valuable links for your own website to increase rankings. Keep the following process in mind to increase rankings by getting linked where your competitors are.

Search For Your Keyword

The first step is to visit Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to search for your keyword. All of the websites ranking higher than you are your competitors. Make a list of these domain names.

Search For Links

The next step is searching to find out who links to your competitors. It’s important to visit all three of the major search engines as they’ll all offer different results. I usually find Yahoo! gives me the most links, but you should check all three. When visiting the search engines, use the following model to search for your competitor’s links.

Google
link:www.domainname.com
Yahoo!
link:http://www.domainname.com
Bing
link:www.domainname.com

Write down the web directories, websites, and blogs that link back to your competitor’s websites. You can ignore links coming from within your competitor’s website, from article directories, and from websites unrelated to your field or industry. You want to focus in on the quality links coming from relevant sources.

Getting Your Own Website Linked

Now that you have the high quality links of your competitors, it’s time to get your own website linked in these places. You can usually insert your link into web directories yourself. Getting websites and blogs to link to you is a little more difficult, but not impossible.

Consider leaving blog comments with your backlink or write a guest blog post to gain blog links. Don’t be afraid to ask website owners to link to you, especially if you have something valuable to offer their audience.

Take your time building these links to improve rankings because you can actually do some damage to your rankings if you build links too fast. Build your links nice and slow so they seem natural to the search engines and you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings.