Learning how to find the right sites to approach (link prospects) is essential to your link promotion campaign. Approaching the wrong types of web sites will virtually guarantee the failure of your link promotion campaign. However, selecting the right sites will 'pave your way' towards link promotion success. Once you learn how to pick the right sites, you will notice that things "magically" seem to get easier.... - your link request response rate will increase (webmasters won't just throw your messages in the trash) - webmasters will be more likely to link to you - visitors to your web site will have more interest in your content - search engines may look more favorably on your pages What to look for when selecting web sites to approach Imagine the ideal prototype site you would like to find and have link to you. It should contain information relevant to your web site and reach an audience who would be interested in your web site. A link to your web site should make sense for this site and even enhance the value of this site. Furthermore this site should look professional and give the impression that it will be around for a while. After you do this for a while, you will develop a second sense when you come across one of these 'perfect' sites. But until then, let's break down the factors.... Content You will want your link prospect sites to have similar content to your web site. It does not have to be identical, but there should be a tie-in that makes sense. Example A. A resort in Maui, Hawaii,
might approach... Example B. A nationwide florist specializing
in roses might approach.... Audience When evaluating link prospect sites, ask yourself what type of audience the prospect has. Then determine if your web site would be of interest to this audience. In example B, visitors looking for suggestions for a Valentine's Day gift might very well be interested in a nationwide florist specializing in roses. Non-competing You will want to take special care to determine if your link prospect site competes with you in any way. If so, you will want to immediately eliminate them from your list. If you are in direct competition, they won't link to you, and they might even use a variation of your link request letter to start a link promotion campaign of their own! Link-friendly A good prospect does not have to have a dedicated links page (a special page containing numerous outgoing links), but it is a good sign if they have one or more links to related sites someplace within their web site. Rationale: A webmaster who has linked to outside sites in the past is more likely to respond favorably to a link request. Professional Make sure your prospect sites look professional. Do they look like they were slapped together in a matter of minutes? Is their content severely out of date? Does their web site consist of mostly brightly flashing banners? If you have a bad feeling about a web site, rule it out and save yourself the time. Do they have their own domain name? In general search engines look more favorably on sites which have their own domain (e.g. companyabc.com) versus sites hosted on free web space (e.g. geocities.com/ personal/maryjane/mysite.htm). You may want to take this into account when selecting sites to approach. Estimated traffic / Alexa ranking Ideally, you will want to approach sites which are heavily trafficked. Sometimes you can tell by the nature of the site (e.g. it is obvious that UsaToday.com receives more traffic than your local weekly newspaper web site). Other times, it is not so simple. We strongly recommend using a free tool called Alexa which gives you an estimate of how much traffic a given web site receives. (For more information on Alexa see our 'Link promotion templates and tools' section.) Once you download Alexa, you can make a more informed decision about which sites to approach and select link prospects which will maximize your traffic. How to find these web sites Now that you know what to look for in link prospect sites, you may be wondering the best ways to find these sites. 1. Keyword searches on major search engines One simple way of developing
a list of sites to approach is by using the major search engines.
Our personal favorites are Yahoo, Google and AlltheWeb.com. To find relevant sites, fire up your browser and visit one of the major search engines. Perform a search on the keywords you think your web site visitors would be interested in. Then visit each site and use the above factors to select sites worth approaching. Going back to our previous Example A, some keywords you might search for are 'Hawaii honeymoons' and 'Maui resorts'. 2. SECRET WEAPON: Link Popularity search on competitors How would you like to be handed a list of web sites that meet the 'content' and 'audience' requirements above and have already demonstrated their 'link-friendliness' by linking to a site very similar to yours? We are talking about the list of web sites which already link to one of your competitors! You can easily generate this list by running a Link Popularity report on your competitor's web site. The report will show all web sites which link to your competitor. You can then visit each of these web sites and determine whether they are good link prospects. Since they have already been 'pre-qualified', in many cases they will be! For example, let's say the webmaster of Papa John's Pizza wanted to engage in a comprehensive link promotion campaign. He could spend hours trying to locate different sites which would be interested in linking to a pizza company web page. Or he could run a Link Popularity report on one of his competitors (Dominos.com or PizzaHut.com) and find thousands of web sites who are related to 'pizza' in some way because they already link to a national pizza company. 3. Use of specialized link promotion tools. There are also very useful
third-party tools which make it much easier to find good link
prospects. For a listing of these tools and detailed reviews,
please see our 'Link
Promotion Tools'
section.
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