Link building is one of the most important parts when it comes to SEO. In fact, link building is your entire off page SEO. So without some good quality links, you will not be able to get any rankings at all. Here, I will discuss an effective, yet simple way of using your competition to find link partners to your site.

We all know that link building can be very time consuming and for most of us it can be a really boring job. But why go out and search for link partners when your competition can show you exactly where to get the links from? Think of it this way… if your on page SEO is done correctly and you can get all the links that your competition has and even more, what will stop you from outranking them in the SERPS?

So what I am trying to say is if you do not check your competition’s backlinks and use it to get links for your own site then you are seriously losing out and wasting a lot if time.

So if you do not already know where to see your competition’s backlinks then don’t worry. I will show you exactly how you can do this.

What works easiest for me is using the SEO for Firefox extension. It shows you all the nofollow links, the yahoo backlinks of a site, the yahoo page links of a certain page in a site and much more.

Another excellent plugin is the quirk plugin. You can download it by going to this URL: http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/

If for some reason you do not want to use Firefox then you can also do this manually by going to Yahoo and entering this as your search: linkdomain:www.competition.com -site:www.competition.com

The linkdomain: tells Yahoo to return all the sites that links back to this site and the –site: tells Yahoo not to return the pages where internal links are shown within the site. The reason I say you should go to Yahoo is because Google doesn’t give all this data and Yahoo is much better where this is concerned.

When you have this, then I would recommend making a spreadsheet where you type all the URL’s where you feel you can find potential link partners. I usually ignore the PR 0 pages and the pages where there is nofollow links on the page. Personally, I will not waste any time getting links on sites such as these.

It will take some time, but when you are finished with the top 10 results on your search query, I am sure that you will have a nice big list of potential link partners.

Tip: If you feel that this is too much work for you and you don’t have time to go analyze all the competition’s links, I would recommend checking out SEO Spyglass