One of the methods I use when link building is based on the philosophy that if a site is willing to link to two or more of your competitors, they will be more than likely to add a link to your website. This most likely won’t get you the nice gems of unique links, but it will get you a quick start.

I find this method especially helpful for new sites. It’s easy to find a fair number of sites quickly and the links will get your newly launched site out there.

So how do you find websites that link to your competitors? The first thing you need is a list of the domain names used by your competitors. By doing a search for all the possible combinations of two of those competitors you will end up with a long list of potential link building sites.

Lets look at an example, say your launching a new site selling DVDs online. Some of your competitors would be Play.com, BlahDVD.com, amazon.co.uk and HMV.com (there are a loads and loads of other competitors, but lets keep it simple for this example). Yahoo! can provide us a list of webpages that link to both Play.com and BlahDVD.com using the linkdomain: advanced operator. You can now simply run through all the search results which will provide a list of potential link building websites. All you need to do is contact the webmasters with your request if the site is appropriate.

The linkdomain operator limits the search to pages linking to those domains. Unfortunately the corresponding operator is broken in Google. Searching for the sites domain names - “play.com” “blahdvd.com”; will provide limited results. The query will only show sites that mention the domain on their pages, leaving out pages that use different anchor text. Also, it will includes pages that mention the domain without actually linking to the page. Even with these drawbacks a quick scan through the results is often worth it.

I used to create a little cross table in a Excel which generated HTML code for all combinations possible, copied that to a HTML file and off I went. As I realise not everyone has access to or is as familiar with Excel, I’ve created a link building tool to create the cross table with links for you:

Simply enter the domains in the link building tool, select the search engines (Yahoo, Google or Live Search) you want to query and it will provide links for all the possible combinations.

The search engines currently included in the tool are: Yahoo! using linkdomain: and without using linkdomain, Google and Live Search.

Some additional features are provided to make things as easy as possible. You can disable the automatic stripping of the www. subdomain, remove quotes around the domain search. Show the results without headings, for compacter viewing and you can add additional (negative) keywords to limit all the generated search queries.

Happy link building!

The independent features an interesting article comparing prices of business broadband in Ireland with a number of other (mainly European) countries.

Their results are similar to my experience. I’m paying similar prices as they list for German and France, but rather than 16Mbps or 18Mbps I’m only getting 3Mbps for my money. For a 12Mbps (the fastest available where I live), I would have to pay €1908 a year.

Read full article: Struggling with New Year broadband blues

Dan Crow from Google spoke at a Search Engine Marketing New England event, and mentioned a new potentially very useful tag “unavailable_after”. With the tag you will be able to indicate to Google when a page will no longer be available. The tag can potentially be used on offer pages and a large number of other types.

Brian Kaminski has written an interesting article on 5 tips for B2B marketin. His main points are:

• Don’t chase volume
• Understand where your customers live and breathe.
• Don’t be afraid to be a bit geeky.
• Focus on what makes you unique.
• Remember, seasonality is a key factor.

Read the full article: Understanding Your Audience With Search, B2B Style

Redefining Conventional Wisdom On “Enterprise Class” Web Analytic by Avinash Kaushik

Discusses what and when Web Analytics solutions can be called “Enterprise”. In short: pick a solution that fits your business.

Jakob Nielsen reports in his Alertbox that breadcrumbs used for navigation are becoming more useful.

He states the following reasons:

• Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
• Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page.

He concludes that although some people ignore them, for the visitors who do look for them and use them they add to a favourable usability experience.

As I’ve long argued, breadcrumbs are different than most other little-used design elements for the simple reason that they don’t hurt users who ignore them.

Read complete article http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html