In my last post I mentioned that the summer can be a good time to check out what your competitors are up to so that you can work out what you might need to do to improve your online marketing. There are a couple of tools I use to do this which gives me an idea of what competing sites are up to by reviewing where their back links are coming from.

The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer:  Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.

By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?

If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.

A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:

“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk

(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)

You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.

Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.

A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.

It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!

Gaining links to websites isn’t easy and is getting more difficult every day as more and more website owners are inundated with link requests – which are mostly automated.

However, it doesn’t mean you should give up altogether, but means you need to be much more targeted about who you approach and how you ask them. What’s important is to give other website owners a good reason to link to you and your efforts should be a little more successful.

Before you begin though, make sure your site is worthy of being linked to! If you’ve not updated it for a while, or still have areas under construction, then make sure you deal with these things first as you don’t want to put people off from linking to you because of a shoddy website.

You’ll then need to do some research into the type of sites you’d like links from, and possibly wouldn’t mind linking back to (after all, most other businesses you approach will probably want the link reciprocated). If you’re a physiotherapist, the type of sites who may want to link or partner with you are alternative therapists (perhaps a reflexologist or acupuncturist), personal trainers, local gyms or sports clubs etc. Not only would you like them to link back to your site, but these businesses could be potential sources of leads.

Then prepare some short descriptions of your site to send over to the website within your email, you need to make it easy for them to put your link up, so don’t expect them to think of a description for you, it probably won’t be what you’d like anyway.

When approaching the website, try and get the website owners name if possible and make the email a little more personal. Things you might like to include are a bit about your site and what services or products you provide. That you very much like their site and have perhaps already included it on your site (e.g on your links page). You then need to include the description of your site you’ve prepared and your website url.

Give them a good reason as to why they should link to you, perhaps that you could be a good source of leads for each other. Finally end the email and let them know that it isn’t an automated request and they won’t be added to any email lists.

You may never get a response from your email, but that’s just part of link building, so don’t take it personally. Whatever you do though, record who you’ve emailed and when, so that you remember who you’ve approached, and may want to repeat the email a few weeks later. As long as you emphasise what’s in it for them, you should get a much better response than many of the automated requests out there.

For more ideas on link building, you can read a post I wrote last year: Link Building Ideas

Last week I mentioned three things you need to start doing now to get your website ready for those all important Christmas sales. Here’s the second part of what you need to be doing:

4. Interact Online
The web is becoming more and more interactive, so you need to start interacting online to get your name out there and find people who are interested in your products. Networking online is proving to be very effective for many businesses, and the best thing is that most of it is free, it just requires time. Start by commenting on blogs, find groups to join in Facebook or if that doesn’t appeal to you, forums are a good place to answer questions.

5. Encourage Conversions on Your Website
Once you get more visitors to your site, you need to make sure that they’re buying from you. If you want to increase your conversion rate, there are a few things you can try:

i. Create a short usability test for some friends or family who don’t know your site. Ask them what they think of your site and to perform some basic tasks. See where improvements could be made.

ii. Make sure your web pages have strong calls to action and visitors know what to do on your site or where they should go.

iii. Add fresh content regularly so visitors know the site is up to date and the company is proactive. Add news, product reviews, testimonials, tips. Anything of interest to visitors. Even changing images regularly can make a big difference.

iv. If writing sales copy isn’t your forte, then employ someone who can, as good copy can make a real difference to the success of a website.

6. Keep on Top of Your Competitors
As part of your online marketing, you should also be checking regularly to see what your competitors are up to. Are they advertising via PPC or other websites? Where are they gaining links from? Are they getting good PR coverage, and are they prolific social networkers? Have they recently updated their website and what have they included? All of this information can help you improve your online marketing and make sure you keep up with them or take the opportunity to overtake them!

All of these activities I’ve posted about in the last week should help your campaign in the run up to Christmas so that you benefit from increased visibility online and increased sales.

Gaining links into a website is one of those things all site owners need to do if they’re serious about promoting their site. It’s necessary for the wider visibility of your site, and for being found where your target market hangs out. Links are particularly important for rankings in Google, as Google looks at which sites link to a website and these links can greatly influence how well your site ranks. Moreover the quality of the link rather than the quantity of links that’s important – making gaining those links even more difficult.

Gaining quality links into a site isn’t easy – it’s very time consuming, you may even lose the will to live with it, but it needs to be included into the day to day activities of promoting your site. If you’ve been trying to gain links unsuccessfully for a while, then here’s a few resources which may help make your life easier:

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity – from SEO Book

50 Ideas to Kick Start Your Link Building Strategy – from Marketing Minefield

8 Tips to Get Domain Diversity – from SEOmoz

Headsmacking Tip #1: Link Requests in Order Confirmation Emails – also from SEOmoz

5 Ways to Discover Link Building Ideas – from Search Engine Watch

Q&A: A Few Things You Need to Know About Links – from Search Engine Guide

There’s No Such Thing as a Worthless Link – from Search Engine Land

Hopefully the above links will give you lots of new ideas, but if you’ve got any great ideas that have worked well for you, drop us a note as we’re always keen to hear of ways to successfully gain links.

Link building is one of those things that you know you need to do to help rankings and get more traffic to your website, but something that always gets put to the bottom of the list. A necessary evil!

One of the reasons why I think many businesses don’t tackle link building is because of the confusion that surrounds it. Some of the business owners I speak to get confused about links on their own site pointing to other sites and links pointing back to their own website.

When it comes to adding links on your own website that point to other sites, you can link to whichever site you want to link to, as long as you’re happy to list that site on your website (so don’t just link to any old site if you get link requests, only if you’re happy to do so). However, including links to other sites from yours won’t help with your ‘link popularity’ (search engine rankings through quality links), or help drive traffic to your website.

Gaining those all important links has become increasingly difficult over the last couple of years. In the past, web directories such as DMOZ (Open Directory) and Yahoo used to be great places to gain links from, but these links are becoming less and less valuable, so it’s not really worth the time and effort of submitting your site to the many free directories that are out there.

When starting out building links to your site, think about your target market and where they might be. List the websites that are prominent in your industry and may have somewhere on the site you could gain a link from. Are there forums and social networking sites within your industry? Make sure you’re listed on those. Approach sites which offer complementary products or services to yours – they can be great places for links and drive targeted traffic. Doing some PR? Links from PR campaigns can be extremely valuable not only in terms of the quality of the links, but the traffic too.

So before you start submitting your website to all those free directories you find (and have probably never heard of!), really think about who you’re marketing to, so that you don’t waste time gaining links from sites that not only will probably never be found, but will send no traffic to your website.

Link building is one of those necessary evils in that the quality of links you have to your website can play a significant part in search engine rankings, but it can take a long time to gain a good selection of quality links to a website. So where do you start?

In my experience, being organised is a good place to start, so before you even begin submitting your site, requesting links or partnering with other sites, you need to think about the type of sites you want
to link your site with.

Firstly, put together a spreadsheet where you will record sites you want to contact or submit to, if any of the links are paid and how much, and most importantly the date you submit your site or contact the site owner along with their details.

Next, prepare some link text that you can give to a partnering site to use to link to your website. Don’t rely on the partnering site to write your text link for you. You need to make sure your link text
contains appropriate keywords and is an objective description. Web directories such
as The Open Directory and Yahoo only allow approximately 25 words in a description, some allow more so prepare a variety of link text and descriptions of different lengths.

Finally think about the type of sites you want to link with. Are they sites that complement your offering? For example if you offer physiotherapy services you may want to link with complementary therapists who could refer clients to you. You may want listings in local business directories if you’re targeting a specific geographical area.

Do you have profiles on business networking sites with your link, do you post useful comments on blogs?
All of these can help to bring a wide selection of links to your website.

We’ll be covering more on link building, but preparation is key to managing and keeping on top of your link building strategy.