[MUSIC PLAYING] In the last lesson, you learned about the importance of offsite SEO and some great strategies for building backlinks to your website. If you decided to try Ahrefs for keyword research, you can also use it for link research. If not, I recommend using Moz's free Link Explorer tool, which offers 10 free searches a month. Since I have a brand new website, I don't have any links yet.
If your website's been around for a while, it's a good idea to look at your own backlinks. Either way, you can use a link research tool to look at your competitor's backlinks for ideas. OK. Here I am on Moz.com, in their Link Explorer tool. It's a good idea to look at some of your direct competitors for link ideas, but you can also look at indirect competitors as well.
Because my brand on theneutralist.com is all about eco-friendly and sustainable fashion, I'm going to look at Everlane for ideas. So I've searched Everlane in Moz, and there's a lot of stuff here. If you have time to dig into it, it's really interesting, and you can learn a lot of advanced link-building tactics.
For today, I'm just going to hop over to the Inbound Links tab. Notice at the top here, I can see Everlane's domain authority. You can also use Moz to check your own domain authority. Now, when you scroll down, you can start to see some of the top websites that are linking to Everlane. I'm going to scroll through and look for some interesting ideas for my own backlinks.
One thing that pops out to me here is that they're included in a holiday gift guide. This gave me an idea for another backlink tactic I could use. I could go around and pitch other blogs that typically do holiday gift guides, and ask them to include my products. As I'm scrolling through, I can see a lot of Tumblr accounts and blogs of potential influencers that I might want to reach out to.
For each website, remember to check the domain authority. Even if it has a low domain authority, it's still helpful. But if you're choosing between multiple websites to reach out to, a higher domain authority will usually help more. And it's really that simple. I would continue this process, looking at a bunch of different competitors and websites in my niche to get more ideas for websites I can reach out to for backlinks.
Now, join me in the last lesson to learn the good habits of SEO to help you continue to grow. [MUSIC PLAYING]