I came across this cool tool a few days ago called TouchGraph. Simply type in your domain name or the keyword you are targeting, and let it do its magic. This tool uses the Google “related sites” query and displays a very cool chart. I tested a few out so far and find that they will display a lot of related sites and competitors. This means that you can go visit these sites, and ask the webmaster if you could write and article for them. Its easy to tell who runs the market for the keywords you input by the size of their circle.

Quality back links are essential in beating your competition. No longer do two way “link swaps” work. I use LinkDiagnosis.com to analyze my competition’s links. LinkDiagnosis will analyze their Yahoo In links, and then pass it through the Google API to determine their page rank, and if the link is a DoFollow, or NoFollow. In just 3 hours I was able to scan many competitors and find blogs where the comments were DoFollow. You can see just so much valuable information on this site.

Contact the webmasters of the high PR sites and ask to write an article for them. DO NOT have a set email template asking for a link swap, its not 1999.