Link Building Guide – Step 1
Back Link Analysis:
Before building links for your website or blog, you need to be good at Back Link Analysis. It is important that you can distinguish good & credible sites from spammy ones. A good and credible site is one that has authority and user acceptance in its niche and people do not just bounce of, when they land on this site from SERPS.
Hubs & Authority Sites:
Remember:
- Authority is a website to which many others link
- Hub is a website which links to many others
- A strong hub links to many authorities
- A strong authority has links from many hubs
A Good SEO Riddle 
Also there are many type of Authority Sites:
- General Authority Sites: like Wikipedia, Hubpages , Squidoo etc.
- These sites are considered authority as a whole due to their useful and spam free content. There can be different opinion about which sites are Authority or not, but these three sites are an example of Generally Authoritative Sites.
- Topical Authority Sites: These are sites that will be focused on one topic only like programming, IT, designing, etc.
Remember Topical Authority and User Acceptance are key signals for a site to be ranked highly in SERPs. Because such site will be providing usefull content for a specific and focused niche and users will be more than delighted to find such an informative source of inforation and thus Search Engines will be like to present them in their Search Engine Results.
Conclusion: Try to Participate in Topical Authority Sites as much as you can and backlinks from such sites are not only good for SEO but they will bring relevant and qualified traffic as well. Otherwise, if you are building an information site, try to build an authoritative site on your specific niche, People will be eager to link to you due to good and remarkable content.
Analyzing Competitor Backlinks:
Now if you are willing to analyze your competitor backlinks, here are the fast steps to do it:
- Yahoo Site Explorer: The obvious choice for backlink analysis is Yahoo Site Explorer. You can find it at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Using Yahoo Site Explorer: (Click on the screenshot above to view larger image. )
- First enter the URL of the website.
- Select the option to view Inlinks.
- Select the option to view links coming from other domains.
- Alexa: As cross check it is good practice to view the Unique Number of Websites linking to a domain, this can be done through Alexa. visit: http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/sem-seo-resources.com and enter your desired your domain name to check the website. Check the screen shot below:
Anchor Text Analysis: The third thing to test right at first is the Anchor Text Analysis. You can search Google to search for free tools offering Anchor text analysis of backlinks of a competitor. In this way you will have a good idea about the keywords your competitor is focusing!
This is a of series of my short and precise tutorials on building quality backlinks without spamming others. Building Quality Backlinks pays in long term, so think wisely. Subscribe to RSS of this blog for coming posts and share your comments.
April 8th, 2010 - 18:02
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May 25th, 2010 - 22:51
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April 10th, 2011 - 06:13
Very informatives and useful resource that our Marketing team will use to enhance our SEO and link building.
Thanks for sharing and caring enough to let others share in your insights and wealth of know+how!
Best,
Jared
April 17th, 2011 - 06:19
Thank for sharing your knowledge – much appreciated.