Inbound Links: Finding Sites to Link to You
Once people understand the concept of how inbound links can increase your search engine rank, the next question comes “How do I find sites to link to me?” Does your industry have any association websites? Are you a member of a chamber of commerce that includes links? Soon people exhaust the more obvious potential linkers (I think I just made up a word) and run out of ideas.
I have two suggestions. The first is to see who is linking to your competitors and see if those people will also link to you. Your competitor might have an incoming link from various directories that are not partial and would link to you as well.
You can find a list of websites that link to another website through Google. Go to Google and type the following into the search box, replacing yourcompetitor.com with your competitor’s domain name:
link:yourcompetitor.com
Examine the results and see if any of the websites returned will link to you.
The second way to find links is to seek directories that are offering similar products to yours. How do you find these directory sites? Once again we turn to Google. This time, however Google doesn’t have a nifty tool to find website directories so we need to use a little Yankee ingenuity and a touch of JavaScript.
Most of the open website directories will have a link on their website to “submit your site” or “add your url”. If we search for those phrases in websites we will find directories. If we just search for “submit your site” without the quotes you will get tons of useless information. So we will wrap the phrase in quotes so that Google only returns sites with that exact phrase rather than just all of the words. Likewise the directories might have used “add a URL” instead of “submit your site”.
We also want to make sure we find relevant directories and not just random link farms. Therefore we should include one or maybe two words that name our product or service. Put it all together and that is one very long, but targeted Google search. Thankfully, I have built a tool to hopefully make it all much easier for you. Just enter a keyword into the field below (I’d recommend just one keyword) and click on ‘View Directories’. A Google search will be automatically started for you in a new window with the master search.
Before you start going through the results, keep the following information regarding your website handy in a blank document ready for copy/paste:
- Title - don’t forget relevant keywords
- Full URL
- Your email address
- List of keywords (few will ask for this)
- Description of your site, 250 characters or less
Tim Flight
Search Engine Optimizer