Link Building Guide Part 1 - Thank You Mr Yahoo

I’ve had a large number of emails from people who are frustrated with building links to their newly created PhpBay Pro Websites. Rightly so, when you’re starting from scratch it can often be disheartening to see traffic trickle through. But don’t worry, the more you build the more you’ll have to leverage off eventually.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to create a series of posts that outlines varying ways of generating & getting links to your sites. You may want to read a few of my other posts on this topic before this one to get some background:

• Ultimate Affiliate Link Building Guide
• Tips for beating Google’s Sandbox
• Link Building Tips

Now that you’ve digested those posts lets start with the first technique.

Technique 1 - Yahoo Site Explorer & Yahoo Search

To use this technique you’ll need Firefox & the SEO for Firefox Tool.

Yahoo updates their backlinks much more frequently than Google (pretty much daily). It’s the most up to date information you can get on a sites backlink profile.

Therefore the basic theory behind this technique is that it allows us to see where other sites are getting their links from & thus why they are ranking higher than we are. Thus allowing us to get those links too & then some.

This is technique is useful for three reasons:

• Enables us to see how difficult it is to outrank a particular website
• Opens the doors to new methods of link promotion we might not have thought of
• Allows us to scan the backlink profile of whichever sites we want (this is important)

With the SEO for firefox tool there’s 2 main settings that we’re interested in. The Y! Links & Y! Page Links.

• Y! Links: This shows the total inbound links to the entire site
• Y! Page Links: This shows the total inbound links to a specific page

I mentioned this technique a few weeks ago in the Al Gore Hacked Post. It’s useful to see what Blackhat’s are doing to get links & also what your competitors are doing that’s different from your Link Building Campaign.

I’ll let you in on a secret, this technique is pretty much how I stumble upon any other techniques I’ll be outlining later in this guide. With careful analysis you’ll be able to find plenty of nice places to drop links.

This post is part of the Link Building 2008 Series.