Chapter 15
Finding Sites to Link to Yours
In This Chapter
Getting other sites to link to you
Finding who links to your competition
Reciprocal link campaigns
Building links through syndication
I
n Chapter 14, I explain the value of linking — why your site needs to have
backlinks, links from other sites pointing to it. Now you have the problem
of finding those sites.
Chapter 14 gives you some basic criteria. You need links from pages that are
already indexed by the search engines. Pages with high PageRanks are more
valuable than those with low PageRanks. Links from related sites may be
more valuable, and so on. However, when searching for links, you probably
don’t want to be too fussy to start with. A link is a link. Contrary to popular
opinion, links bring value, even links from unrelated sites.
It’s common in the SEO business to say that only links from “relevant" sites
have value, but I don’t believe that’s true. How do the search engines know
which sites are relevant, and which are not. They don’t. Sure, they can guess
to some degree. But they can’t be quite sure. So my philosophy is that every
link from a page that is indexed by the search engines has some kind of value.
Some will have a higher value than others, but don’t get too hung up on rele-
vance. And don’t worry too much about PageRank; sure, if you can go after
sites with high PageRanks first, do it, but often it makes sense to simply go
get links and not worry too much about the rank of the linking page.
Use this chapter to go get links, and things will start happening. Your site will
get more traffic, the search engines will pick it up, and you may find your
pages rising in the search engine ranks.
