One of the most important criteria for search engines to find your site is number of quality incoming links. We know that incoming links are essential to your SEO campaign, but often it is hard to know exactly which links to go after. If you’re just trying to build links in the dark, you’re going to waste an awful lot of time and energy for not a lot of return. That’s why we’re so excited about this new tool from SEOmoz.org

SEOmoz.org recently released a new tool built on their Linkscape research. It’s called Competitive Link Finder and it is part of their Pro series of tools that you can access for around $80/month.  The goal of this tool is to help you find all of the really great links that are driving traffic to your competition.

Here’s what the results look like:
Now I Have the Info, Now What?
With this competitive research in hand, you can really start to understand why a site outranks you. Remember, the formula for ranking higher than your competition is to beat them in:

1.    Indexed pages

2.    Incoming links

3.    Incoming links with the anchor text matching the keyword you want to rank for

4.    Site age

5.    Domain PageRank

6.    Page optimization

Now you can have an exact roadmap to which incoming links are necessary to rank higher.

Why is This Tool Better than Others?
Here are a couple really useful features of the tool:

1.    Ignore NoFollow Links: The tool ignores all of the nofollow links, so you only see which sites are linking directly to competitors.

2.    Ranked by Importance: SEOMoz constantly refines their metrics. The results are a really good estimate of the most important and valuable links.

3.    Comprehensive Data: Linkscape crawls the most important sites on the web, so you’ll have access to the most important information.

4.    Finds the Important Hubs: One important model of SEO traffic is finding the “Hubs” or important pointing sites that drive a huge amount of traffic. This tool is great at locating hubs.

5.    Keep Track of New Links and Competitors: View hundreds, and even thousands of link sources and new competitor sites as they move up the ranks.

6.    Compare Your Site to Any Similar Site: It’s important to find all potential competitors, not just direct competition. You’re limited only by your imagination.

Find Your Competitors Using Google
When faced with a new killer tool, often stare blankly at the input form and aren’t really sure what to do.

Here’s a good place to start when using the tool. Use Google to search for your most competitive key words. The top 10 sites in your industry are your most important competition. Sites like Wikipedia.org are not necessarily your competition.

Once you have a list of the highest competitors, find the ones that are just above you in the rankings.

This is a useful list because it will give you a good idea of what to do to rise up in the rankings.

If you spend a couple hours with this tool, it really will give you a good idea of how to raise your site rankings.

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