WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Researching Your Niche

When you're working to improve your SEO, you can use a lot of publicly available data. This data can help you determine where you should try to get links and what type of content you may want to target. These two sites can help you get a general picture of the niche you're working in:

• Google (www.google.com): In the section “Using links as currency,” earlier in this chapter, we tell you how you can find what types of links are flowing into a Web site by typing link:www.yoursite.com into the Google search text box and clicking Google Search. (Replace yoursite.com with the domain you want to target.) Google gives you a list of the sites linking to your site. By doing this search for other Web sites in your niche, you can find out the sources of their links — industry-specific directories you may not know about, places where they've guest blogged, or other resource sites that you may be able to get listed on.

  This data gives you information about what to target for a link-building campaign.

• SEMRush (www.semrush.com): SEMRush (see Figure 4-4) offers both paid and free versions, and spending a few dollars for a month's access to the light version of the product can be a good investment. (The free version lets you look up only ten results at a time.) SEMRush allows you to see the terms for which other Web sites rank. Use this information to judge the health of the competitor's domain, the number of terms for which it ranks in Google's top 20, and the terms themselves. ...