How To Find Relevant Websites For Your Linkback Requests

There is of course several ways to find relevant websites and several ways to request a link back to your website.

First let’s look at some ways to get them to link to you, then we’ll talk about ways to find the right websites to target with your link requests.

1. Write a high-quality article related to your target audience and optimized for your keywords. Offer the article to the website owner in return for a link back. Offer it as exclusive content. Do not submit it anywhere else on the web and guarantee them that they will have the exclusive. You are offering content that has value for your link back.

2. Email them and request a link. Not a link trade. That’s worthless. Ask them if they will link to you and explain why it might benefit their readers.

3. Email them and ask them to review your website on their website. Offer a fee to cover their time reviewing your website. Of course make sure they do actually link to you in the review.

4. If you own more than one website, offer them a link on one of your other websites in exchange for the link they give you to this website.

5. Buy it. If all else fails, offer cash. This usually works.

Now, how do you find the right websites to request links from? First 4 guidelines to help you determine whether or not to even request a link.

1. Make sure they are not link farms. Yes a PR8 website is a good place to get a link from, unless they have a ton of outbound links already.

2. look at who they already link to. Make sure they are not linking to a bunch of unrelated websites or websites that would be considered bad neighborhoods.

3. Look at the code for the outbound links they already have. If they are using nofollow on their current links, then they will likely use the same thing for your links.

4. Does the website look like it is employing any bad tactics such as no relevant content or spammy content? Does it look like they might be trying to trick the search engines? Are they just trying to make money with adsense or yahoo publisher? You only want links from relevant websites that have a legitimate purpose. Success breeds success. If the site you are looking at appears to be a successful website or at least attempting to be, then you are in good company having a link there.

There are a lot of other things to look at, but let’s move on to how to find the right websites in the first place.

1. You can search for your keywords in google and look at the top websites in the organic results. This is the most obvious way. However, many of the top websites in your field may be your competitors or have other reasons they do not want to link to you. Does not hurt you to ask the non-competitors though.

2. You can search for related keywords and phrases. An example would be if you are a travel agency and search for terms like “information about france”, “sights to see in germany”, “famous landmarks in India”. These websites may be strictly informational and their owners may be more likely to add your link than the business websites you found in a search for your keywords.

3. Use google adwords to help you choose websites. Set up an adwords account if you do not already have one. Participate for 3o days. make sure you check the box to place ads on the content network. At the end of 30 days go to reports. Look for a report called placement performance. This will tell you all the websites google found that was related to your content. If google finds them relative, then you might want to directly request links from these websites.

That last method is the one I find the most valuable for finding the websites to request links from. Hope that helps.

PS: When requesting a link using email, please do not make a form letter you send to everyone. Many of us own several websites and will receive your request more than once. In addition to that, I can tell if your email is to me or to “everybody”.

Reference something you like about their website. Include how you found their website. Website owners love to hear you found our website in a google search for a particular term. Make sure you really can find them for that search term if you do. If my name was on the contact page, use it.

That’s all for now. More tomorrow.

Chris McElroy aka NameCritic
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