eComm Tips

Yesterday I showed you how to use the Yahoo! Site Explorer to check how many pages Yahoo! has picked up from your site and also how to check and see how many backlinks they have discovered. This is a great tool to use so that you can see if all of you hard work building links is actually getting picked up.

Today I want to talk to you about another way to use the Yahoo! Site Explorer. Simply put, you have competition out there that is most likely also building links. Would you like to find out how many they are building or have already built?

First you need to find out who your main competition is. To do this, just go to any search engine (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) and do a search for a few of your main phrases. Take note of the websites that are coming up first for these phrases, especially any that show up on multiple phrases. Write down their basic domain name.

Next, go over to Yahoo! and type in site:www.theirdomainname.com and from there follow the instructions that I gave you yesterday. This time you’re looking at the information about your competitor, not your own website. In a sense you’re spying on what they’ve been doing, but don’t worry about getting in trouble for it!

Besides just seeing how many links you competition has, you can also explore a little bit and see what phrases they’re using on these sites that are linking to them. This will give you an idea of what phrases they are most actively pursuing with link building and can help you formulate your link building strategy.

This is just one easy to use tool to help you see what’s going on out there with your own site and your competition. I hope you find some good use with the tricks I’ve shown you today and yesterday. Let me know if you have any questions or need me to clarify anything!