Six dominant ways to find link targets,

1.Pit your referrer logs
Check for your referrer logs each day. Cut and paste that day's websites you referred into an Excel spreadsheet and then review it once a month. Take the sites that refer to most traffic and do a backward link search for similar sites that you could also approach.

2.Find out who is linking with your competitors
Logic tells that if sites link to your competitors, they can also link to you. But do not stop at just sending 'me too' link requests. See carefully at the sites that are linking to your competitors. Which market sectors do they come from? Are there any surprises there? Is there a niche market that you did not thought about. Again for each useful site do backwards links search.

3.Pierce down through the directories
You can start with DMOZ, Yahoo and Looksmart. Look particularly for information sites or industry specific directories. Try to be comprehensive and explore as many relevant categories as you could.

4.Scan for the blogs
Search engines always love blogs for the reason that they are full of fresh content and extensive links. They're useful for linking since:

• Blogs are huge pointers to useful interesting sites


• When you are making a comment, you often get a link back to your site


• You will get a feel for the real news of the day

One of the top places to look is DayPop, a specialized search engine that will crawl more than 59,000 news sites, RSS feeds and weblogs at least once a day. You could find more blog search engines in The Search Engine Journal.

5.Look out for the ezines
Ezines usually provide more in-depth content than the blogs and they are published less often. Cumuli Ezine Finder and EzineDepot are good Ezine directories. You could also do a Google search so that if you're looking for ezines on photography you just enter the search term, 'photography ezines'.

6.Develop journalists
Find the traditional media in your market sector and watch what they are doing online. Start to maintain a record of key journalists and the type of story they cover. Make some searches on Google News - and note the latest news in your industrial area. If you are finding this useful you can also sign-up for Google's news alert service.

posted by Skarmund @ 4:02 PM permanent link   |

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