Your goal in doing this is to find out who your competitors are receiving their traffic from. If your competitors are outranking you on the search engines and you want to know one of the many reasons why then this is a first and bountiful step towards your goal. If you want to find out who your competitors are, think outside the box! I own a web design company so there are about 30,000,000 different competitors. I had to narrow it down a little today by focusing on the keyphrase minnesota web design on the search engines. Sure, I am working to take on the entire state of designers but thats a challenge I think I can take head on.

Compiling An Excel Worksheet - The Process

Dont just go to Google or Yahoo and use this method by clicking on your competitors incoming links. You need to open up an Excel Worksheet and keep track of the following:

1. Your competitors URL
2. The web sites that are linking to your competitor
3. The email addresses of those web sites that link to your competitor.
4. The names of the webmasters whose web sites link to your competitor.
5. An email to be sent to all of the webmasters whose web sites link to your competitor.
6. Send out the email request for a link to your web site.
7. Repeat the process with another competitors URL.

Finding Your Competitors Link Fire

So how do you find out who is linking to your competitors and helping them rank higher in the search engines? Its easy.

At Yahoo! type in link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com/
At Google type in link:http://www.yourcompetitor.com/
At MSN type in link:yourcompetitor.com/

Effective Methods Of Stealing Their Fire

1. Send an email to the webmaster of whom you want to to have an incoming link from.
2. Make a phone call to the webmaster.
3. Send a letter via traditional postal mail (if you remember what that is bloggers)
4. Always be kind, courteous, and reciprocal in your requests.