What are your chances to beat your competition?

That is a question that many of us ask themselves quite often…
Too bad that many ask this question at the wrong time – after they have put great effort and time into ranking for a certain keyword and not reaching the desired goals.
Is there a way to estimate whether a given keyword is worth trying to rank for?
Here is what I do:
Do a google search for the keyword in question.
Take the URL of the number one search result (or number 3 or 10, depending wheth.er you want to see your chances for a lower rank, too).
Next head over to Yahoo and do a “link:competitorsurl.com” search.
Yahoo will then show the number of incoming links to that URL. Google has a “link:” command, too. But to be honest, forget it. They just don’t show what they know, Yahoo is by far more accurate.
You can switch the incoming links display to “except from this domain” to get a better idea of how much work is you’ll have to to ragarding building backlinks.
Of course you never know exactly whether Yahoo has indexed all backlinks that google has but on the other hand not all of the links will have your keyword as an anchor. So this method will give you a good Idea of how many backlinks you will need to reach your desired SERP position.
This method requires a little bit of work – if you are too lazy try SEO Elite, this fantastic piece of software will help you find out about your competion, can track your rankings and a lot more!

After you know the amount of backlinks necessary you can start building backlinks.  You can start out with commenting to do-follow blogs , and again, if you are too lazy try something automated, like building backlinks automatically with 3waylinks.

From my experience any site that shows up to 500 links can easily be beaten, for sites with more backlinks, often a little more dedication is needed. If you use 3waylinks in combination with other link building strategies and bring some patience with you, you can definitly reach your goals.

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get free backlinks by defining your characteristic terms on http://therarestwords.com/

[Update: The service does not seem to exist any more…]

The Rarest Word is a new service that can show definitions of words that are characteristic for websites. When you check your own website (you can add it, if it is not known yet) it shows you all the words that are seldomly used on your page and thus are characteristic for your site. If the term does not have a description yet, just enter one and you get a free backlink from that keyword to your site!

Is that all you can do with it? No! You can also get new ideas for keywords and topics by having a look at your competion respectlively related sites. For that there is a section called Auto SEwOrdizer: It shows a list of keywords that other sites which share the same characteristic words with your site do use and you don’t. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

This is a useful new method of getting a few free backlinks that you can use together with blog commenting and other techniques.

[Update:]

You get a free backlink if there are terms with no definition. If you are the first one to submit a definition for a keyword, then this keyword is linked to your site. So by defining words, you can get lots of backlinks with these terms as anchors to your page…

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[Update II:]

Is seems that this service does not exist any more…