by Dan Dixon, Web Reach Consulting

Link building is one of the most essential elements of increasing traffic and authority for your website.  A high quality website with relevant content can easily build a linking campaign. The purpose of link building is twofold:  1) provide an avenue for a visitor to find your site and 2) increase your authority in the eyes of search engines.  Yahoo! Site Explorer can help you analyze your current inbound links as well as your competition’s links.

Asses your Current Links

The first task is to figure out where you stand. You need to determine how many links you have, where the link comes from, and where it links to.  An easy and effective way to get this information is to utilize the Yahoo! Site Explorer.  Find the search box at the top with the command “Explore URL.” Enter the address of your website and hit the explore command.

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Click on the “inlinks” tab and it will display all of the links to the entire website, including internal links from your own site.  Select the “show inlinks: except from this domain” option to filter out your internal links. 

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You can then either choose to look at links to your entire domain or to just the url you specified in the “explore url” box. This process should give you an idea of how many links you currently have.

Research Your Competitor’s Links

The Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool to look at your competition’s linking strategy. Once you know your competition, you can easily apply the above process to find out how many links they have and where their links come from. Since your competition is likely to be in the same industry as you, many times you can try to mimic their linking strategies.  Also look for industry directories and suppliers that could potentially give you a link.