Most people are eager to look into whether their competitor's page is properly optimized or not, before they get their own page optimized for search engines. The plan is to find out what are highly ranked pages doing in the keyword market, only to get a faint idea of what is going on in order to improve and perform better.
Now the question arises of how to find out, what is in the competitor's mind? There are number of tools available in the market which offer what can be called Competitive Intelligence. This implement works as a scanner for you, from which you can study the competitor's search engine marketing tactics’ that are running properly for them. The flaw of these tools is that they charge a high rate of admission. For instance, a company by the name of Web123 charges $18,000 for a domain. Such a hefty pay-package draws them out of the economical industry.
By many ways you can analyze your adversary's page for free. If it is possible for you to get a detailed outline of the services which any big company offers, you can surely get hold of the rank that search engines give to your competitor.
Calculating link structure
If a website is ranking well on search engines then it is bound to have flowing incoming links. Most search engines provide an advanced and detailed analyzes of the links. Yahoo is a good source for getting much detailed analysis of the inbound links of a website. Though, Google as well as Yahoo have the same data on links, Google tends to hide the links data from search engine optimizers. Hence, we make use of Yahoo's database, considering the fact that both the search engines have similar data.
For instance, if your keyword is 'real estate', then it's considered as one of the most challenging keywords in the field. Begin by checking the top pages on search engines, because for sure the top ranking pages are bound to get good web traffic. Then, we may go back to Yahoo to get backlinks of the highly ranked pages.
This will crop up the top ranked page on Google, i.e. – http://wwww.realestate.com
Typing this in Google's search box, it will display all those sites that link to the top ranked website. The number of websites that link to a particular page may vary from time to time. But this kind of search, gives you better results as far as significance of inbound links is concerned. With the passing time, search engines do not give importance to incoming links from onsite, which you may want to disprove the links that realestate.com uses to link itself. To do this, you may combine the link command with another Yahoo search command called 'site.'
You are given the liberty of adding or removing sites from the search command. For example, in order to know which all pages link to realestate.com homepage apart from the one coming from realestate.com itself, type the following link: http://www.realestate.com/ -site:realestate.com
The link command demands of 'http://' which may be used before the URL, whereas the 'site' command demands to omit it. For best results, one has to look after and take care of such small nuances and see to it that they are performed accurately.
Removing the 'www' from the site command will benefit in terms of those sites that have conflicts within and therefore will show inner links from both, www and non-www edition of the pages. Once you remove links from its own site, this will result in to realestate.com's link numbers going down from 239,890 to 187,000, clearly showcasing a major number of links that are internal. Yet these internal links are not as important as the external inbound links.
The 'linkdomain' command of Yahoo displays every single page that links to any of your pages on the whole site. The command is used as :linkdomain:www.realestate.com
With the help of this command, we come to know that there were a total of 530,000 pages which link across the www.realestate.com website. Only removing all the internal links, we get the exact count of 351,000 external links: linkdomain:wwwrealestate.com -site:realestate.com
The combination of these techniques will help us to determine about any website's deep-link ratio, where many links point to the subpages of the site rather than the site's homepage. Knowledge of this is necessary, as search engines likely fall for sites whose most links point to their subpages. This seems more organic in comparison to a linking angle, showing that not only the homepage is necessary and important but the rest of the pages are also as important as the homepage, in order to stimulate people to link with them.
Taking the first example (link:http://www.realestate.com -site:realtor.com), be aware of the fact that there are 178,000 external links at Realestate.com's homepage.
With the second search (linkdomain:www.realestate.com -site:realtor.com), the number of external links are 323,000 in all that are pointing to any and all pages across the realestate.com site.
If we remove the number of links that point to the homepage from the total number of links that the site attained, the counting comes to 156,000 i.e. the quantity of links pointing at the site and not the homepage. Dividing this number with the total links will give us the deep-link ratio figure.
156000/323000 = 0.48 = 48%
Generally a deep link ratio is better than anything else. Sites which have good ranking for almost every competitive keyword consist of a deep-link ratio by 35 to 45 percent.
Yahoo link, linkdomain and site command can be synthesized in many other ways. Links can be outlawed from various sites by using the site command repeatedly, as below:
linkdomain:www.realestate.com -site:realestate.com -site:homeshop.com
If by chance we remove links from homeshop.com then the total number of links of realestate.com comes down to 334,000, which means the overall 16,000 links from homeshop.com are pointing towards realestate.com. Whenever you come across any site that links to any other website, which is actually linked to that another site from thousands of internal pages, indicating a site wide paid link – something that many search engines frown upon.
To only see links from homeshop.com to realestate.com, you may use the below combination: linkdomain:www.realestate.com site:homeshop.com
The 14,300 links from homeshop.com to realestate.com will be displayed. The conflict here is in the calculation of 16,000 links above. Do not follow these searches blindly, they aren't 100% accurate, as they keep fluctuating with time and technology.
This kind of searching will help us to know what the quality is like and not the quantity of a site's backlinks. We surely do know that majority of search engines pay attention to .edu and .gov links as they are tough to maneuver. So, here is how the linkdomain and site commands can be used to know how many .edu links any site is pointing at: linkdomain:www.realestate.com site:.edu
With this we get to know the number of .edu links that are connected to realestate.com. Google seems to favor .edu links majorly, that is the reason realestate.com stands firm in competition of the real estate industry.
You may follow the same procedure for .gov sites or other top level domains (TLDs) like .mil, .museum, .aero, .int, and .jobs. These top level domains are highly trusted upon and so are difficult to acquire links from. Therefore, any site who manages to get links from these trusty domains, that site is assumed as authentic by search engines.
There is a way of checking how many links a site has from the two most accredited directories (Yahoo Directory and DMOZ):linkdomain:www.realestate.com site:dir.yahoo.com (60 links), linkdomain:www.realestate.com site:dmoz.org site:dir.yahoo.com (7 links)
With the above method, we can see that realestate.com is not harming any of the department of these trusted links and this is one of the reasons, that today it is on the top in the keyword market.
Above article has been written by SEO Consultant talks about the ways to analyze your competitor’s backlinks. To know more about SEO visit Semaphore Software, a New Jersey SEO Company.
