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As a webmaster Link Building seems like a very daunting task; with so much misinformation, poor advice and varied personal opinions on the web it’s not hard to see why most people can be confused as to where to start – the most common questions I get asked by clients and friends are:

What are the best types of links to build?
How many links do I need to get to the first page of Google?
Should I use the same keyword anchor text or mix it up with brand terms?

Well all of that is relative…

Invariably my answer starts by asking them more about their competition. Competitor analysis is a very important part of the link building puzzle. By understanding what your competition are doing to hold on to those all important and much sought after search engine results then you too can learn more about the types of links you need, what type of anchor text and generally the volumes of links you might need to rank well.

With so many tools available in the market place and the large amounts of data that can be produced by them it has never been easier to snoop on your competitors. In this post I am going to carry out a competitor analysis for Cash Cow UK, a free to use internet auction site, so you can understand a little more about the processes I use to analyse the link profiles of my clients competitors.

Using the free to use Google Keyword Tool I normally find 50-100 keyword phrases that my client wants to rank well for to get more traffic to their site. I then run a quick Google search to find out who the top 5 ranking pages for those keywords are and make a note of them. (There are some more advanced automated techniques that I use to do this but for now I want to keep it simple)

For the purpose of this case study I am going to just focus on 3 key word phrases:

Online Auction – 60,500 UK Searches per month

Online Car Auction – 8,500 UK Searches per month

Free Online Auction – 1,300 UK Searches per month

Intuitively you would think that eBay would be top for at least 2 of these search terms however they only appear once in these SERP’s and in position 2, this is very common to find when you ask a client to tell you more about their market as they often over state and under state their competition’s online presence.

I have decided to look a little more at the back link profiles of uk.madbid.com, ebay.co.uk, uk.ebid.net and totalbids.co.uk in order to find some quality link opportunities. The two tools I would recommend are SEO Spyglass it’s free to trial and less than $100 for a license or you could try the SEOMoz pro tools again it is free to trial but its $99 a month thereafter, however it provides lots of great data, including Social data and tonnes of great reports.

Below is the output from SEOMoz’s Link Metrics Comparison tool, as you can see there are lots of external links pointing to eBay and ebid however Total Bids who we saw were ranking very highly for Free Online Auction only have 200 external links. So I will probably start here to understand this better.

What we are interested in here is the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA), this is a value calculated by SEOMoz based on the quality of links that are pointing at the page. SEO Spyglass does not have DA and PA but it does give you the Google Page Rank of the linking page and linking root domain which can also be useful to determine good quality links.

Go to Open Site Explorer and input the page you want to analyse; in this case I have input www.totalbids.co.uk

As you can see this page has over 1100 links from over 100 different domains, it has received only 7 Facebook shares and 1 tweet. This looks like quite an easy link profile to investigate to find some great links.

Firstly we want to look at the Anchor Text, this is very easy to do in both OSE and SEO Spyglass:

As you can see a lot of their anchor text is just their brand name there are very few links containing the keyword that they rank well for. I would say over 50% of their links don’t have any mention of Online Auction or Free Online Auction. This means that we are working in a niche where quality counts.

You now want to export the links report into Microsoft Excel by using the Download to CSV function. I normally only export the domains and followed links so that I can see what type of site they are and to determine how easy or difficult it will be to obtain the link. I normally don’t export no follow links as these are often just blog comments and have very little link value.

Now you want to do the same for all of the link profiles of the other competitors and add them to your list. You should now have a master list of several hundred if not thousands of domains to target.

I normally then sort the lists of domains by DA or Page rank and categorise them as one of the following:

Info Site – low quality information site
Education or Government Site – hard to find links
News Site – quality newspaper or news site e.g. Mashable
Article/Press Release
Blog –possible Guest Blogging opportunity or product review
Web Directory – easy to obtain by submitting a link

Then in the same spreadsheet I then put a few notes and actions I have taken e.g. when I sent an email to the webmaster, contact details of the blogger etc.

Advanced Tip: If any of the blogs have a Twitter Account, be sure to make a note of it and write down the number of followers they have and their Klout Score. This will help you determine whether they are a key influencer in their niche and how much effort you should put into getting a link on their site. You can easily find someone’s Klout score by visiting www.klout.com/(username) where (username) is their Twitter username.

Now that you have your list of sites to approach for a link you need to decide what your approach will be. How much time will you spend chasing that elusive link and what can you do to get it.

I normally approach link building with the easy links first I list the site on all the directory sites that I have found and if they are paid directories I will sum up whether or not the quality of the site is worth paying for the link to be added or not. I usually do this by looking at the DA and PA of the pages my link would appear on and whether it would be just as easy to get a free link from another source.

As for the article and press release directories I will submit a few pieces of content to these if they have a good DA but I really don’t value these types of links and I believe the Search Engines have devalued these types of links over time too. However SEO is not just about getting links it’s about getting traffic and brand recognition too so a few press releases/articles now and again never hurt.

If it is a lower value blog or site that I want to target for a back link then I may simply send them a nice email asking for a link adding to their article, in this case their list of eBay alternatives. With this link analysis I also discovered a number of Blogspot, WordPress, Squidoo and other web 2.0 properties. I would consider making some web 2.0 properties myself if I couldn’t persuade the owner to give me a link. For the higher quality news sites and blogs then I will spend time getting to know the blogger or webmaster in order to get a guest post, share an infographic I have created or perhaps get them to review my client’s product. This is where you want to target your most efforts, a link from a few high profile web sites can catapult your site in to the big time so this is where you want to be creative and invest your time.

I hope you found this guide useful and hopefully it’s given you some insight into how easy link building can be by researching your competition.

+Chris Dyson

Every SEO forum since the dawn of time Google has been debating the power of high authority links such as .Edu or .Gov links. There are literally dozens of articles out there in the great wide web and every few months a different debate begins on how much these links actually effect your rankings.

It’s a common belief in some SEO circles that a link from .Edu or .Gov site is the best type of link you can ever get in order to improve your rankings. This belief comes from the fact it is not easy to obtain control of these domains on the open market as you have to be an educational or government establishment.

So are Google actually giving more or less weighting to certain Top Level Domains (TLD’s) well yes they can, and do look at the case of co.cc domains, but in the case of .Gov or .Edu links they claim not to do so as Googler JohnMustated:

In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get “additional credibility from Google.” Because of that, the whole topic of working especially hard to talk webmasters of these domains into linking to your sites seems a bit problematic…

Some in the world of SEO will scream conspiracy that Google don’t want to let out the secret recipe but then let’s look at these types of links from the proper angle. Google may actually be telling the truth their algorithm may not give these TLD’s a considerably higher weighting than a .com or .co.uk but it is all actually based on Pagerank. Remember that thing Larry Page invented which means links from web pages with lots of links themselves carry more value than those that don’t.

These types of web pages are often well linked to and many have been around for years. So what I am saying is that despite their “perceived” authority due to their offline status as an institue of learning it is actually the quality of the pages that are linking into these sites i.e. Corporate blue chip companies, Major hospitals or large news resources e.g. the Guardian, BBC that make them an authority online not the TLD.

How to get .Edu or .Gov Links?

With the right amount of time, hustle or money you can get a backlink on just about any site you want. Building relationships, investing in the right tools and good content will allow you to get these links easily.

From past experience I have used Broken Link Building on .Gov or .Edu sites, whereby you look for broken links on a resource and inform the webmaster to replace the link with a resource to your own content.

Outreach also works quite well in order to gain .edu links as most universities now provide their students and faculty with blogging platforms and sub domains so it is quite easy to email them relevant content to their blog or studies. If you really wanted to invest a significant amount of time and resources you could look for a piece of research they produced and reference it in a piece of your own content e.g. an infographic and its highly likely that you will obtain a link back as they will naturally want to share this with their peers.

Invite an academic to write an article on your blog or even come and speak to your workforce or at an industry conference you are running, chances are they will link to you as they wish to reference their engagements. As you can see you are only limited by your own imagination as to how you can obtain these types of links but by offering useful resources for Government or Academic webmasters to link to you will have a much higher success rate.

So What is their Value?

If you were to ask me what I look for in a link then, I value backlinks on the number of visitors, neigh, the number of pre-qualified visitors that the link can send me. What I mean by that is if I could get a few hundred visitors to my site from a back link, who are motivated to buy my product or subscribe to my mailing list, I would spend more time and money obtaining these links than just chasing links from Universities and Government sites.

So do Edu or Gov links help get you better rankings, yes but they are no better than any other well linked TLD, and remember after all SEO is not just about rankings!

Here’s some of my bookmarks for SEO tools and other useful SEO related pages. This is by no means a complete list, I’ve been very careful not to overload this page with “more of the same” – each tool here serves a different purpose, few are alike, and all are worth bookmarking.

Website Analyzing & Research Tools

Marketing Grader
This page gives you a nice overview of your website’s marketing related items. I personally liked HubSpot’s “Website Grader” a lot more than this one. This tool seems to have a hard time finding your blog’s RSS feed, social profiles, and other stuff. It’s a great way to get a quick perspective about how your site is doing, but take everything from the report with a grain of salt.

Page Analyzer
Provides insights on any page you scan including keyword density and other good metrics to get a quick overview of a page.

Open Site Explorer
SEOMoz’s very own Open Site Explorer. Their link index is updated every 4 to 8 weeks (depends if they are having difficulties.) You can use it without an account but you get very limited access. At the very least, you’re going to want a free account to get any use out of this tool. I personally use their paid plan (starting at $99/mo) because they offer some great tools and access to more data from Open Site Explorer is just one of the things you receive.

Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is another company that “crawls the web” and creates a nice index of sites and links. Their index is much fresher than Open Site Explorer. You can get a premium account for as little as $49/mo, making it a great value for smaller agencies or individuals.

Uber Suggest
Got a basic set of keywords and want to expand it into 100s? UberSuggest makes it super easy to get a ton of keywords related to any word(s). It’s my preferred method for quick keyword brainstorming.

If I want a lot of data, I use Scrapebox for keyword harvesting.

Chase the Footprint
This tool helps you find links related to your keyword by using footprints. By using footprints you can target both the keyword and the type of link you are really trying to get. Link types may include: communities, donation/sponsorships, resource pages, blogs, message boards, Wikis, and others.

Keyword Spy
This tool gives you insight on the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) efforts of another website, or an industry (via keyword searching.) It can give you estimates on the total number of clicks, or the daily Ad budget for specific websites. It even shows roughly how many keywords (and which keywords) their Ads are showing up for. Below is a quick screenshot of an overview:

Google SERP Scraper
This site may look sketchy or outdated, but it’s a great way to quickly export the SERPs for any query. I think you can do this via Google Docs now, I will update this entry if I find a Google Doc template offering the same functionality.

Google Trends
Who better to get trending search data than from the giant themselves! Google Trends will help you find hot topics to write content about. Viewing the history is a bit more interesting. Historical data can give you future insights as to which topics seem to attract large search volumes, followed by for how long the “buzz” of the topic lasts.

Want examples? Search for Yankees and you can see a lot of spikes during World Series events, especially ones revolving around the Red Socks. Do a search for Red Socks to see more on this.

Google Insights
Google Insights delivers a bit more data on search volume. You can drilldown to more specifics about keywords. Examples include regional searches, searches across Google’s different products, and by topic (health related, financial, news, etc.)

Google’s Keyword Research Tool
The Google Keyword Tool provides you rough estimates on search volume for keywords you enter. You can narrow it down by searching for both Broad or Exact matches for your keyword. This tool also lets you know the average cost per click ($CPC) and the overall competition for it in AdWords. Always remember that the competition bar is not related to organic searches!

PageRank Recovery Tool
Creates all the code you need for an htaccess 301 redirect for pages that have been moved or removed.

Readability
How “readable” is your website’s content? Can the regular Joe understand it? Does the reader need a Doctorid degree to understand the contents? This page will help you get a better idea of how well your content can be consumed by your target audience.

CopyScape
Check to see if someone has been ripping off your content. The premium service is well worth the fee ($25 for a ton of scans!)

Domain Tools

DomainTools
This is my favorite site for looking up the WHOIS data of a domain, server IP, name servers, or whatever else you need to know.

Who is Hosting This
Knowing the real web host of a particular website is useful in all sorts of situations whether you need to . Unlike tools like Netcraft and Domain Tools, WIHT use multiple data sources to give you a more accurate impression as to who is hosting a website. (Recommended by Chris Dyson.)

Lean Domain Search
Search for 100s of available domains by entering in any word you want within the domain. It’ll give you a whole bunch of suggestions.

Expired Domains
Do yourself a favor and sign up for a free account here. Even if you aren’t looking to buy old domains, it’s a lot of fun to mine through this data, and sometimes you’ll find an incredible domain up for grabs!

Chrome Extensions for SEO

PageRank Status
PageRank displays Google’s Toolbar PageRank for whatever page you’re on. If you click it, you can see the page’s Alexa ranking, the website’s IP address, and some useful links relating to the domain.

SEOQuake
SEOQuake provides a lot of free information about the website you’re currently on. Things include Alexa rank, WHOSIS data, Archive.org data, etc.

Mozbar
SEOMoz’s SEO toolbar. Provides Moz Metrics as well as easy access to the server’s IP address, WHOIS data, and other useful resources relating to whatever page you’re currently on.

Check My Links
Checks every link on whatever page you’re on, looking for any that are somehow broken. It also displays how many internal and how many external links are on any given page.

HTTP Headers
Displays the HTTP header statuses of any website you’re currently on.

Firefox Add-ons for SEO

SEO Toolbar by SEOBook
This free toolbar packs a punch but is only available for Firefox. You can display Open Site Explorer data, SEMRush, Compete, Ahref, Directory listings, Google PageRank, and other metrics with this tool. You’ll need to sign up for a free SEO Book account in order to download it.

SEOMoz Mozbar
Displays the SEOMoz metrics on any page you’re currently on. This tool also has nifty links that go to SEOMoz’s web tools on both SEOMoz.org and Open Site Explorer. You can use this for free, but having the paid tool will benefit you more.

Internet Explorer Add-ons for SEO

The best SEO tool for Internet Explorer
This is absolutely the best thing to hit the Internet since the first LOLCAT showed it’s cute furry face. If you are in SEO / Inbound marketing and use Internet Explorer, this tool is a MUST. So much so, I’ve listed it as the only SEO tool for IE users.

SEO Tips, Resources, and Guides

Google Analytics campaign URL builder
Track your data better in Google Analytics by sharing links that have been built out with extra tracking attributes. Generate those links here then share them!

SEO Glossary
Aaron Wall is an established figure in the SEO industry. SEOBook is his company, they have some really great tools (including SEO Toolbar listed above.) This glossary is a great resource for people who want to learn terminology of the industry.

SEO Tools for Excel
Excel is a powerhouse and a must-use tool for most SEOs. This add-on packs a big punch helping you turn Excel into the ultimate tool for SEO.

Excel for SEO
That SEO Tools for Excel link above means nothing if you can’t use Excel. Let Distilled (a globally recognized SEO company) teach you the ropes of Excel for SEO use.

Outreach Letter with Real World Examples
This is an excellent post that has some real life examples of different types of outreach emails for link building. Good information from real data.

SEOMOz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO
A great guide for beginners in the SEO industry, or any small business owner with a website and a bit of time to read and learn.

53 Ways to increase conversion rates
Not so much SEO directly, but let’s be honest. If you are spending time doing SEO, you better get your CRO stuff down right!

By now you’re probably well acquainted with Google Suggest. Its Google’s search tool that gives you Search suggestions as you type your query into the Google search box.

Google Canada Prepaid Credit Cards Screenshot

And while Google Suggest can generate some hilarious and weird results, you can also you it toquickly generate a massive longtail keyword list in minutes.

This article will show you how to combine two awesome Google Suggest scrape tools to generate a list of hundreds or thousands of related keywords in minutes. Then I’ll show you how to turn that huge list of keywords into something you can actually use.

What the heck do I want all those keywords for?

If you’re wondering why you’d want such a list of longtail keywords, wonder no more. I use this Google Suggest scrape method to find keywords for two things:

New content ideas– Stuck on topics to write about in your niche? Scraping Google Suggest will give you content ideas you’re not going to find anywhere else.The results Google Suggest shows you are a reflection of search activity on the web. Sure, the keyword phrases it suggests may not get a lot of searches, but they are getting some. You can use this scrape method to unearth great longtail phrases that are easy to rank for and still generate traffic.
PPC campaigns– Think you’ve found all the right keywords to bid on in Adwords? Maybe not.By scraping Google Suggest keywords, you can find keywords to add to your campaign that you would have never thought of.Just as importantly, Google Suggest scraping is a great way to find negative match keywords to target before you waste your money on them.

Now that you know why you want to scrape Google Suggest, let’s get into my method of actually doing it.

Step 1

Start at Ubersuggest. It’s a free web-based tool that lets you export lists of Google Suggest phrases based on a keyword you enter. Kudos to Ken Jurina for showing me this.

Enter your keyword and select your language. You can choose to scrape Google Suggest phrases from the web, news, or products searches. In this case I’ll use the web results.

Now check the txt box – that will let you download the results in a text file.

Click “suggest” and a suggestion.txt file will download to your computer. Open it in NotePad++, regular Notepad screws up the spacing.

Now I have a list of 242 “prepaid credit card” related keywords that Ubersuggest has extracted from Google Suggest.

Step 2

Here’s where the fun starts. We are going to take all 242 keywords from the previous step and look for even more Google Suggest results using ScrapeBox. While UberSuggest lets you scrape the results for one keyword, ScrapeBox lets you scrape the results for hundreds of keywords at a time.

Not familiar with ScrapeBox? You should be. It’s a powerful way to speed up SEO tasks like keyword research and link building.

I should fully disclose here that ScrapeBox is typically a black hat SEO tool. Sure, it’s popular for mass blog comment spamming, but it’s also a versatile tool that can be used for white hat SEO too. Think of Scrapebox as a weapon – in the wrong hands it’s deadly, but it can be used for good too. And we’re all about the good.

Once ScrapeBox is open, drop that list of keywords from Step 1 into ScrapeBox’s Keyword Scraper Tool.

Select your scrape sources and search engines. There are a number of options here, and your choices will depend on the type of site you are doing keyword research for. The product and shopping suggestions are handy for ecommerce research, but for content ideas I just focus on the main search engines:

Scrapebox Keyword Scraper Options Screenshot

Click “Scrape” and kick back as ScrapeBox does its thing. This can take a few minutes depending on the number of scrape sources you picked, the number of keywords in your main list, and the speed of your proxies.

When ScrapeBox finishes running, I click “Remove Duplicate Keywords” and I am left with a list of 574 keywords related to prepaid credit cards.

Want even more keywords? Transfer the list you just scraped back into the main keyword list and run another scrape.

What do I do with all these keywords?

So now you have 100’s of keywords. Are they all useful? Of course not. But with a few minutes of work in Excel, you can turn this unmanageable mass of keywords to a targeted list that you can actually use. Here’s two different ways you can refine the list.

If I’m using the list for PPC keyword ideas, I rely on Excel’s Conditional Formatting and Sort & Filter functions to hone in on the keywords I’m interested.Let’s say I’m running an Adwords campaign offering prepaid credit cards from a major credit card provider. The client is sensitive about their brand image – they don’t want to appear to be marketing to minors.With Excel, I can use the “Text That Contains” Formatting option to highlight uses of keywords like “teen,” “kid” and “child.”This highlights all keyword phrases that contain my specified text. But the highlighted keywords are still mixed in the regular keywords, so I’d then filter the list using the “Sort by Color” option. The “Sort by Color” option brings all the highlighted keywords to the top of the list so I can review them all at once.

The Google Suggest scrape method is great for finding new negative match keywords you didn’t consider. In this case I found people were using phrases I hadn’t considered, like “under 13,” which I immediately add to my negative match list in Adwords.
If you’re doing keyword research for content ideas, you’re going to love what I am about to tell you: With Richard Baxter’s Google Adwords API Extension for Excel you can take your list of keywords from Scrapebox and, from within Excel, grab Adwords search volume data.That’s right – no more flipping back and forth between the web-based Adwords Keyword Tool and your Excel sheet. Talk about a timesaver. Now you can sort all your content idea keywords by search volume, which will show you where you’re best off investing your content-creation time.The Excel extension is free; all you pay for is the API costs to Google, which are negligible. High-five to John Doherty for showing me this.

So now that you know how to build a huge list of longtail keywords using Google Suggest scrapers, what are you waiting for? Get cracking! Test it out now and start generating new ideas for your website or PPC campaign.

Spice Mag

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