When it comes to finding links, since the dawn of SEO one constant piece of advice has been to look at your competitors links for opportunities. Unfortunately, this means wading through the muck in order to find the gems. How do you gather, organize and prioritize all of those links? Wouldn't it be nice to take a power-hose to all that mud and grime to more easily uncover the best prospects? It's not that difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide for doing just that!

1. To make this easier I create a new folder on my desktop, then tell FireFox to automatically download documents to that folder.
   
2. Select two or three closely related keywords and look up the top ten ranking documents using your search engines of choice.
3. Run Advanced Link Intelligence Reports for each ranking URL and for your own page or domain that you want to rank
   
4. Download the CSV files for both Links to URL and Links to Domain.
5. Separate the CSV files into two groups, one for domain links and one for URL links.
   
6. In each file add a column that lists the domain to which the links point.
   
7. Combine all of the Domain Link CSV files into one Excel spreadsheet.
8. Import the Excel spreadsheet into Microsoft Access.
   
9. Create a query to isolate all the links to your own domain. You'll use this to exclude domains that already link to you.
   
10. Create a second query to remove domains that link to your web site and combine multiple links to the same web sites. Notice how I average mozRank, MozTrust and Domain Juice. This combines multiple listings. I also removed nofollow and same IP address links.
    
11. Finally, I isolate the domains sending links and combine the duplicate domains.
    
12. Now, for each domain that links to one or more top ten ranking web sites, I can easily see and sort by:
    1. How many top 10 ranking web sites each domain links to
    2. Domain mozRank
    3. Domain mozTrust
    4. Domain Juice
    5. The total number of links to all top ten ranking web sites
13. You can repeat steps 7 to 12 to analyze links to URLs.

Thomas M. Schmitz is an SEO Analyst and Social Media Consultant with Portent Interactive.