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Off Site SEO – Link Building

This is the hardest part about SEO and the toughest to understand for
most people. Good links to your site will make you rank higher. If you
think about how many times you search and see Wikipedia show up, it's
because people constantly reference Wikipedia by linking to pages on the
Wikipedia website. To Google, this means the content is relevant and
authoritative. So to boost your own rankings you'll want to get some links.

But where do you even start? That's a question with a lot of answers,
but for beginners the easiest thing to do is to see where your
competitors are getting their links. If a site links to them, they
should link to you, too, right?

If you want to check out a competitor's links, one of the best free
tools is Bing Webmaster Tools. You'll need to first get your site
verified (you can learn how to do this here) and then you'll have a
chance to get to the goodies in your dashboard. Just click into
Diagnostics & Tools > Link Explorer and you'll be able to get
information from Bing's database on links to any domain or page you'd
like (with a limit of 1,000 links).

1. Filter by site – this allows you to limit the results to one specific
site. So, for example, if one of your competitors has 200 links from
competitorbuddy.com you could limit your search to see all of the links
just from that site.

2. Anchor text – this allows you to filter the results by what the
actual text of the links say. For example, if I wanted to rank highly
for "table tennis" I'd want a lot of my links to my site to actually
read as "table tennis" and then link to my page optimized for that term.
If your competitor is ranking highly for a specific term, put it in here
and see where they're getting links with the right anchor text.

3. Additional query - this just lets you do a good ol' fashioned Bing
search within the sites linking to the competitor you're looking at. So
if your competitor sells indoor and outdoor products but you only sell
indoor products, you may want to use some terms here to limit your
results to pages that relate to your indoor products.

4. Scope - this lets you view links to individual pages (dictated by
the main search window, here reading swimtownpools.com) or the entire
site if you choose domain. If you want to see why a certain page is
doing well, select "URL" – if you want the whole site choose "Domain."

5. Source – this is pretty straightforward, the internal links are links
within the site (so if your competitor's about us page links to their
contact us page they'll show up here) while external only shows links
from other sites and both, of course, returns both. For your purposes,
external is likely the most valuable.

Armed with some of this data you can see where your competitors are
getting links from and what kind of links. Are they writing guest blogs
for industry websites? Are they sponsoring events to get links from
those sites? Are they making sure all of their suppliers link to them?
If the answers to any of these questions are yes, you can at least get
started trying to mimic the strategies that are letting your competitors
beat you. Once you get started you can keep tabs on your organic search
traffic in Google Analytics and see if you're moving in the right
direction. Chances are, you will be if you stick with it.

While the tools are free, you will have to invest some time to use them.
Whether you choose to continue doing SEO on your own or through an
agency, you'll at least have the ability to speak intelligently and ask
some better questions if you tackle these tasks.

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