Bloggers Journal

One very important aspect of getting ranked in the search engines is knowing your competition for keywords.  This competition can be used as a gauge as to how difficult it can be to get your share of the traffic for a particular keyword.

On another point, boosting your rank is achievable with incoming links to your website – backlinks.  These give your site some authority.

This article, in the Niche Site Development series, focuses on the competition around keywords, as well as some methods to develop backlinks.

Keyword Competition

Keyword competition is about determining how many other websites are ranked for particular keywords or phrases.  To do this, there are many different ways, the main three being,

• Manually search the competition for all your keywords
• Use paid software
• Use the free method in the SEO Revenge eBook

I’m using the latter to determine my keywords, as well as assessing the competition.

What I end up with is a list of keywords (phrases) which are related to my niche, and are not associated with many websites.  These low competition keywords are awesome to aim for, because it means that you can rank much more easily.

My niche, frugal living tips, has got some competition.  Depending upon which keywords I use, the competition can be massive.  Of course for a niche website, this is not ideal.  But – I like I challenge.  *famous last words!*

Whilst some of my keywords are going to be particularly difficult to rank for, I’m going to try anyway.  I will maybe need to think more directly about my keywords, and perhaps alter the site slightly to make it more focused.

I think are the moment I am maybe looking at too high a level.  Frugal living tips is a very broad niche.  So, from here in I will look at different sub-niches.  Which ones are profitable?  Are there any that can be exploited more easily than others?  These sort of questions must be asked.

The results of this, of course, I’ll post in a later article here at Bloggers Journal.

Guide to Building Backlinks

Understanding your competition is really important to getting ranked.  However, one measure of your page’s worth is the number of incoming links.  If you can get visitors to your site from a high page rank website, then you will be on the long road to success.  At least, that’s my understanding.

Of course, when you have backlinks, the hyperlink will have an associated anchor text.  It is this text which the search engines use to rank you.  It’s why the SEO people tell you use keyword rich anchor text.

There are many ways to create backlinks.  Of course, the common ones are to leave comments on niche related blogs, and build up some credibility at the same time.  Alternatively, it is common place to submit posts to article directories on the internet.

I’m already a member of Ezine Articles – which has a nice and high page rank.  I haven’t yet looked at any other directories, but I know I will in future.  On Ezine, I set myself up with an alternative author name, rather than register a new account.

I know it’s common place for authors to create a whole new set of accounts to fabricate their backlinks.  Lots of them are patient and join millions of places.  Frankly – I cannot be bothered.  I’ll join a few and submit some, hopefully, SEO rich content.

I’ve also registered to use Squidoo.  Squidoo is great because it lets you create articles – lenses.  They are ideal to create some backlinks, but can also earn some passive income in their own right because you can use AdSense, and a number of affiliate programs in your posts – very cool!

The final thing that I did was create a second blog on wordpress.com.  There are a number of other alternatives to use too – or use alongside.  However, I set up the wordpress.com blog with some posts that I wrote.  Each of them contain keyword rich links back to my main niche site blog – all in a bid to get ranked.

The articles that I write are unique.  It’s a laborious task – without doubt.  But I think it’s worth it.

I’m starting to focus more on this, and will report on my successes and failures in future posts.

What other methods do you use to build backlinks?

Part 4 – Niche Website Development – Backlinking Problems

Image credit – origomi