Link building is an important phase of marketing and optimizing a website, to make it prominent on search engine result pages.
Links are one of the value indicators used by search engines in order to rank web pages’ importance, popularity and relevancy, in which the more pages from other websites that are citing your page as a reliable and trusted source of information, the more it gets popular and, eventually, the more it is able to be returned to their users as a result for their search queries.
This process of search engine optimization is composed of two parts – link prospecting and actual link acquisition. Link prospecting is a crucial stage of a site’s link development, given that search engines only give value to high quality links these days. The procedure for identifying good link prospects for your site has two major parts: finding link opportunities and determining the value of those link opportunities.
6 Ways to Find Link Building Opportunities
There are plenty of ways to find topically relevant websites and web pages where you can try to get a link:
1. Advanced Search Queries
The use of advanced search commands on Google Search (e.g. “site:domaintype + keywords”, “intitle:keywords”, “inurl:keywords” “link:domain -site:domain”, “related:domainname” and “define:keywords”) will allow you to retrieve more relevant results, which you can use in listing sites that you might be able to acquire high quality links from.
2. Studying your competitors’ links and relationships
There are a number of tools that you can use to scout out the links that are pointing to your competitors’ websites, but I am going to focus on Majestic SEO’s Site Explorer tool and SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer tool. Both of these tools need to be paid for in order to get the best out of them but they will definitely prove their worth over time. You can also study their linking relationships by checking their blogrolls or list of recommended sites, which can expand the reach of your link building campaign as you are able to track other linking opportunities from their relationships’ link profile.
3. Web Directories
Large web directories such as Dmoz, Best of the Web and Yahoo Business Directory can also help you mine more thematic link opportunities, given that most websites listed on this type of directory are well established. You can also choose to scale your link prospecting campaign by mining the pages linking to the sites you have found listed on these directories (through Yahoo Site Explorer).
4. Twitter Search
In this age of marketing, where Social Media has been emerging, it’s almost certain that most websites on any niche have Twitter accounts integrated into them. Use your targeted keywords to find influential people in your industry.
5. Google Alerts
You can also keep your link building campaign updated by setting up an alert for your site’s targeted keywords via Google Alerts. It’s a free email service from Google, which sends new related results from their index based on your targeted search terms (on daily, weekly or monthly basis).
6. Link search through related foreign websites
Most link builders tend to focus on global and local search when searching for link prospects and sometimes fail to spot a whole lot of opportunities from other channels. Finding and exploring link opportunities through localized Google Search (e.g. Google.de, Google.com.ph, Google.kr, etc…) or country-based web directories will enable you to extract more diverse link opportunities from topically relevant websites, as well as to get ideas on how you can elevate your own strategy by evaluating their link building efforts.
Did I miss any? If you can think of any other link building techniques, share your recommendations in the comments section below.
About Aseem Pahwa
I agree, we should absolutely make the most out of every possible way. Thanks for sharing!
Nice post, Aseem. I love reading useful posts like this. You have given a short but well explained input about link building, which is very important in marketing online. Thanks for sharing!
Kristine recently posted…Architecture and nature co-existing happily together – is it possible?
Nice post, I’ve tried DMOZ but they take forever to list you! I remember signing up but after 9 months, still no link to my website. Aint google saaid something about Panda not crawling directories no more?
Cindy recently posted…Cat Grooming 101
I wanted to learn things about SEO as well as linkbuilding. Thanks for your post, I already have some basic ideas.
With the increasing demand of using internet, link building is something needed by bloggers like me. After reading this post of yours, I learned new insights about high quality link building techniques.
Building links is quite challenging to me. Thanks a lot for sharing ways on how to make it better!
Thanks for sharing its really help me for getting valuable links for improve me keywords
I think you have pointed out all of the most effective steps in effective link-building. I’ll have this article bookmarked, this serves good as a future reference. Thank you very much.
Excellent share! Thank you for such an informative, direct-to-the-point article. Good job on this.
Never thought link-building would be this important. Better make some changes in the way I run my site to increase more traffic. Thanks for the share.
I think people don’t value link-building that much. Only a noted few actually would understand the concept. At the end of the day it makes the traffic.
#2 resonates well with me. I believe that knowing what you’re up against gives you an edge. You’re able to deal with their strategies and of course, take a stand.
Thanks for your information about linkbulding. Now I have new knowledge about these stuffs.
Aseem,
Yet another awesome post. The first point where you suggested specialized search queries is simply awesome. I am going to try some of that to dig into my area of expertize. I am a personal branding coach and I am working to build a little better reputation for my personal website. Thank you for your recommendations
Thanks,
Kumar
Kumar Gauraw recently posted…Schools Kill Creativity – TED Talk By Sir Ken Robinson
Thanks for all the great tips. I’m going to have to use some of these to help me get more traffic to my blog.
Mike Howg recently posted…How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress
I have seen in your post that you discuses about web directories, it is also important technique for link building but in 2012 Google almost banned 2000 directories so, how we can judge that either this directories are good and not. Suppose you got some directories lists then how I identify site quality.
Regards,
Rameez Ramzan
Rameez Ramzan recently posted…Google Roll outs Engaging Infographic, Should Look At In Google “How Search Works”
Yet another useful post. But how ‘define’ parameter is going to help?
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After I read 50+ high PR blogs, another useful post i read today. Thank you for sharing keep posting useful articles.
Chitra Lekha recently posted…How to Make Money Online with Medical Transcription
I am well aware about the significance of the activity of link building, but there were few aspects which were not clear in my head. This post played the crucial role in fixing the missing parts of the jigsaw puzzle. Thanks for sharing these valuable set of tips.
Aayna recently posted…How To Use Fill Function in Microsoft Excel 2013
Thanks so much for this post. I’ve been researching how to build back-links to my blog since I recently started fresh on a new domain. I want to make sure I’m back-linking effectively and proactively. Thanks again for your great post.
Jessica recently posted…MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate Review
As a marketer just beginning to make waves into my career, I have found that link-building is tough business. The difference between black hat and white hat techniques seem to change as quickly as googles algorithms. This article was helpful in identifying the white hat techniques in doing so, and I want to stick to that.
Thanks