Jamdo Marketing Blog

There is a bunch of good software that really can make life easier for bloggers and internet marketers (there is a lot of crap too, some of which I have wasted money on). I own several programs that I use several times weekly when working on my sites. There is only one or two that I find I really need though.

I have blogged before about the importance of link building. But just getting a bunch of links is not going to do a huge amount for you. As I have said before, you need one way links from authority websites with your keywords in the anchor text (and a few other things). This applies to blogs just as to other types of sites.

But how many of these do you need to beat your competition?

The easiest way to do this is to spy on your competition. You need to know how many links they have, what the anchor text says, what the sites are that are linking to your competitor, if they are reciprocal, which sites they are coming from, the page title, how many times your keywords appear in THEIR page etc etc etc.

There is a lot you need to know.

Now you can get all of this for free using search engines and visiting each of your competitor’s link partners. The problem here is that to get all of the information you need from the major search engines will take you WEEKS. You could probably get an idea about it in a few days, using a spreadsheet but it is a lot of work and it may not be so accurate (and you NEED it to be accurate - you will understand why when you spend weeks optimising a site for the wrong keyword, like I have before!).

Or you can use a piece of software called SEO Elite (aff. link) that tells you all of this information about your competitors in a few minutes.

How exactly is this useful?

Well let’s say I wanted jamdo.com to rank well for the search term “blog promotion.” (I haven’t researched that keyword at keywordtracker.com so I have no idea if it’s a good keyword, but let’s pretend it is).

Now I go over to Google.com and type in “blog promotion” to see who is in the top 10 results there.

At number 2 is a blog called “Blogopoly” at the URL - blogopoly.blogspot.com - they look ripe for a little spying.

I can now use SEO Elite to do my spying on this competitor.

SEO Elite tells me that Blogoply has 188 backlinks that are showing up in the major 7 search engines. Those links come from pages with everything from PR0 up to one site that is PR7. The vast majority of the backlinks are actually reciprocal (which are not as powerful as one way links). A lot of their links are also from pages with many, many links meaning the Google juice they pass on will be minimal.

Now onto the anchor text of those links. 94% have the word “blogopoly” in them. Only 13.3% (18) have the word blog and only 11.1% (15) have the word “promotion” in them. This is good news for us if we want to attack that keyword.

Of the pages that are linking to blogopoly, only 14.3% (23) have the term “blog” in the title and only 2.4% (4) have the term “promotion.” That’s great news for us. However, most of the pages have both “blog” and “promotion” in the content of the page which is not great news, because it means the links they have got a generally relevant to their topic.

The good news is that only 6 links have the term “blog promotion” in the anchor text, and no links have the exact term “blog promotion” on its own.

All of this information took SEO Elite about 6 ot 7 minutes to get.

I now know that to beat blogopoly on this term shouldn’t be too difficult. I could continue my natural promotions strategy for jamdo.com which would result in more than 188 backlinks in a few months anyway. In addition to that I could ask a few of my friends and other bloggers to link to me using the anchor text “blog promotion” - especially if they have sites about blog promotion. Depending on the page rank and relevance of the pages that link to me with that anchor text I would need slightly more than 15% of the links I get to say “blog promotion” and I would start to beat blogopoly in the search engines.

This is not an exact science (unless you’re a Google engineer) so you will need to experiment a little, but the crux of beating your competition for a keword is all laid out for you by this software.

Now there are a bunch of other neat tricks that SEO Elite can be used for. I even use it for things that I think the author didn’t even think of (and I will tell you about them on this blog in due course).

You should at least check it out and seriously consider adding it to your arsenal. As I said, it is one of the few pieces of software I use on a daily basis and it has repaid my outlay many times over. I am a big fan. In fact I attribute the success of several of my blogs directly to this software. The blogs in question have reached number one positions for their niche keywords and are making money and affiliate sales as recently as today (23 Dec, 05) - I can’t ask much more than that of any software.

As with anything I recommend on this blog I am always available to answer your questions if you get stuck either onsite or at info [@] jamdo.com

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