Analyzing Inbound Links Using BacklinkWatch Data - First Step: Know Your Top Competitors
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Let’s assume you are a PHP programmer and have decided to target the keyword “PHP developer” as part of the anchor text of backlinks to your site. You should check your competitors on Google's first page.
The following are some of your possible competitors:
- http://forums.devnetwork.net/ -Position 2
- http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php/index.html - Position 6
- http://bendodson.com/ - Position 10
Of course, with higher positions we can expect a higher quantity and quality of inbound links relating to “PHP developer.”
In any competitor analysis you should assume that the competitors have kept building links too. To make sure that you will secure first page positions soon, you have to analyze the higher positions. This acts like a safety factor.
For example, we will analyze http://forums.devnetwork.net/ because it is currently in position two for our chosen key phrase in Google. If you benchmark the quantity and quality of the links pointing to it, you will have some pretty good information as to how you need to conduct your search engine campaign.
The next thing you have to do is go to http://www.backlinkwatch.com and enter the complete URL (http://forums.devnetwork.net/), and then hit “Check Backlinks.” What follows next is that Backlinkwatch will start gathering the data from the Yahoo Site Explorer database. You should immediately see the message “Total backlinks pointing to the URL.” In this example there are ~2877 back links pointing to the main URL only: http://forums.devnetwork.net/
The maximum sample size of Backlinkwatch is only around 1000. After completion of Backlinkwatch's data downloading, you should select "copy" and then paste that data to an Excel spreadsheet.
To do this correctly, you need to point your mouse cursor just before the “No.” and then select “No.” and go all the way down until your cursor reaches the end of the data table. Do not include Backlinkwatch's copyright notice. Then press right click -> copy, go to the Excel spreadsheet, and then right click in cell A1 -> paste special -> text, and finally press OK.
The program will then copy the data from the Backlinkwatch web page to an Excel spreadsheet. To make sure you have done this procedure correctly, download a raw data.xls here: http://www.php-developer.org/2009/03/backlinkwatch-excel-spreadsheet.html to compare.
Next: Second Step: Cleaning up the Data for Analysis >>
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