By: Matt Hockin

Want to know what it will take to get your website ranked at the top of the search engines? It’s all about links. Links are the most fundamental building blocks of the Internet and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

As Google explains on their technology page [google.com/technology/], in-bound links (links pointing to your website from other websites) and Google PageRank are critical to ranking high at the Google search engine. In fact, we’ve found that inbound links (also called “backlinks”) and the keyword optimized text in and around those inbound links account for about 95% of optimizing for the “Big 3” search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.

SEO Gap Analysis:

If you want to know what it will take to get top rankings for your keyword phrases do the following 4 steps…

1) Identify Your Keyword Phrases - Research and identify what keyword phrases your target market uses to search for products or services like yours. List them out.

2) Analyze Google’s Top Sites for Your Keyword Phrases - Simply go to Google, type in the keyword you want to rank for and see which competitor sites rank the highest. Take note of their URLs. For example: competitorsite1.com, competitorsite2.com, etc.

3) Anchor Text Analysis - Now, go to Yahoo.com and run anchor text analysis to see what their in-bound link text says. Look at the exact anchor text they’re using by searching Yahoo! like this… link:http://www.competitorsite1.com. This will display a list of the websites that link to your competitor’s site. Click the links, look at each web page and take note of the link text that is hyperlinked to your competitor’s website. You’ll want to use the same (or very similar) anchor text that your competitor’s are using. NOTE: This is time consuming! To speed things up, I highly recommend Brad Callen’s “SEO Elite” software. Simply open SEO Elite, type in your keyword phrase you want to analyze, click all 5 Search Engines and have the software find ALL the links.

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