Size Up Your Competition and Count Inbound Links

In many cases, making money online involves getting either your blog or website ranked as high as possible on the search engines.  As many of you know – the more inbound links you have pointing to your blog or websites, the higher you will be ranked on Google.  (There are other things that affect your overall ranking, but inbound links are a major portion of the equation.) 

To give you an example, I am trying to get the Residuals and Royalties blog ranked as high as possible for the term “make money online” – which also happens to be one of the toughest keywords in existence!  So, in order to size up my competition I used a tool to count my competitor’s inbound links.  The results were pretty disheartening, many of the top ranking blogs and websites in the MMO (Make Money Online) niche have tens of thousands of inbound links.  Which means if I want to climb the Google ladder – I have a lot of work ahead of me!

The tool that I use to count inbound links is called Yahoo Site Explorer.  I simply paste the URL of my desired website or blog and I get an immediate count of their overall inbound links.  Yahoo Site Explorer also provides you with the total amount of pages a blog or website has.  Below is a screen shot of the #1 ranking blog for the term make money online.  Notice that this blog has 25,175 inbound links!  Needless to say, it might take me an eternity to garner this many inbound links. 

This mass quantity of inbound links won’t stop me from pursuing these keywords, but it does give me a barometer on the difficulty of the task ahead.  To put this in to comparison, this next screen shot shows the current inbound links for Residuals and Royalties.  I have 634 total so far!
So, no matter what your target keywords are – take some time to research your competition.  This is a great way to get a handle on what you’ll need to do to rank #1 in your particlar niche. 

You can check out Yahoo Site Explorer here: Yahoo Site Explorer

If you have a story about surpassing your competition by increasing your inbound links – I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

MJ

Tags: Make Money Online, Residual Income, Royalties