While it’s interesting to find out who’s linking to your Web site, it may be more helpful to find out who’s linking to your competition.

Most popular search engines, including Google, see incoming links as "votes of confidence." The more you have, the higher you’ll rank on a given search…all other things being equal.

Thus, to improve your rank, you should encourage incoming links. Although good content is the pollen that attracts the bees, you can also track down the Web masters of appropriate sites and request a link.

A good place to start is the sites that are linking to your competition. Your competition may be sites that appear near or above you on a given search, or just your local (or global) competition. How do you discover who’s linking to your competition (or yourself?) Good question.

Visit the following search engines and enter the phase without quotes, replacing yourcompetition.com with your competitor’s domain. (You can also use this technique to find your own link popularity.)

Google: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

MSN: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

Yahoo: "link:http://www.yourcompetition.com"

AltaVista: "link:www.yourcompetition.com"

You can also visit LinkPopularity.com to automate these four searches at once.

Once you discover who’s linking to your competition you can contact them and ask for a link to your Web site as well.

Rich Brooks
It’s All About the Linking