One of the best ways to develop your strategy for moving up to the top of the rankings for your primary keywords is to study your competition. Here’s how to do it.

First, perform a Google search for one of your keywords. I’m going to use the keyword “search engine marketing.” A very competitive keyword but it will help me to illustrate a couple of key points. The search brings up the following results.

search engine marketing

From this list I am going to skip the top result from wikipedia because they are not a direct competitor. The next result on the list, searchenginewatch.com, looks like a great site to analyze. First, take some time to look around the site to get familiar with it. Then, plug the site into yahoo site explorer and click explore url. The result will show you both the number of indexed pages as well as the number of in-links. Searchenginewatch.com currently has 375,592 in-links. This is a huge number, which tells you a couple of things. One, is that this is a highly competitive keyword and you will likely need a huge number of links to come even close to appearing on the front page of the Google search results. Second, it will take you a huge amount of time to explore all of these in-links. Third, you may want to do some more keyword research to find a keyword that has less competition.

That being said, lets explore some of the quality in-links that link to searchenginewatch.com. You will want to look for quality in-links, and then try to get those sites to link to you. Depending on the site, this could require just a simple email asking for the link. Here is a seo site that lists some recent stories from some of the top search engine blogs. Looks like a potential candidate. Add there url to a list and keep exploring.

Once you have put a list of sites together, you will need to have a unique strategy for each potential in-link. Take some time and customize your requests. Don’t just send out a spammy, canned email to each potential site. This will lessen your chance of receiving  a link and waste all of the time you have spent doing research.

Get the idea now? Good, go try it!