stuntdubl - 3:43 pm on Mar 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

After gaining so much from attending Pubcon, I was hoping I can give some things back to the community. I'm not sure how much this will help everyone, but I have been passing it along to clients to help defray some of the costs of an SEO campaign. My thought is that if you provide your client with exceptional value it builds the "permission" (ala Seth Godin) that is necessary to retain the types of clients that you WANT to have. So without further ado...Here is Link Dev. 101:

Link Popularity is one of the most important variables in current search engine algorithms. Without too much depth into technical details: YOUR SITE NEEDS LINKS. Basically, each link from another site serves as a vote for your site in the search engines. You WILL benefit from them. Buy, beg, borrow, and steal** for links to your site.
**Okay, don’t take this one too literally. I don’t advocate link theft

Below is a quick starter tutorial on how to increase your site’s link-popularity, and ultimately your search engine rankings. To get lots of links to your site, you need to be able to FIND where to get good links. We have broken link searching down to a few simple steps in order to allow any intelligent “Internet surfer” to become a link developer.

1. Understand what type of pages you are looking for.
This is important to the effectiveness of your search. This is a general tutorial, but the types of links you are looking for will be industry specific. If you are selling custom hot rod accessories, you will be looking in the automotive type areas in directories. If you are selling plumbing services, you will be looking for regional listings or business listings.

2. Find your starting points.
We are looking for quality links from relevant sites. Directories provide the best listings, but there are many other places that are potential link givers. There are several places to start looking for potential link givers. Some of the best places to start looking are the “top” directories. A list has been provided below of some “starting points” for finding your links. Each directory or site should have a category of other directories giving you even more possibilities.

3. Establish if a site is applicable.
There are BILLIONS of webpages on the Internet. This leaves you a lot of options for getting links. Don’t spend too long hemming and hawing over whether a site will give you a link. If it is a large directory or site that is in the same “theme” of your site, then go to the next step. If your site is about dog food, and the site you are surfing is about car parts, then keep moving to the next site. Don’t get slowed down reading, keep your mission of link building in mind. Open lots of windows and bounce around. If your site wouldn’t fit, keep moving!

4. Find the best category to be listed in.
Directories often have hundreds or thousands of categories. Start at the “top” of the site, and work your way through each relevant category. Commercial product selling sites should often look in the “shopping” or “business” categories. Service based sites should normally go for regional based listings. Each directory that you find may lead you to another directory, but you may also run into dead ends. This is why it is nice to have the above mentioned starting points to go back to when you hit a point where there are no more relevant options (and trust me, there is no “end to the Internet”)

5. Locate where to submit your site
Once you’ve established that your site fits on the site, and found where it should go, locate the method to submit your site. Oftentimes, there will be verbiage such as “add url”, “list your site”, “submit a site”, “add link”, or “add a resource”. These links are normally located close to the top or bottom of the page. Keep an eye out and scan or do a “page find” for these words. When none of these are available, find an e-mail address to contact the webmaster. DON’T contact the webmaster directly if there’s a submission form available.

6. Write a good description and document your submission
Each site will have specific submission guidelines. Some may allow long descriptions; some may allow no descriptions. Be prepared for a variety of different scenarios. Keep your descriptions in a word document so that you can re-use them on occasion. MAKE SURE that your descriptions fit within the guidelines of the site you are submitting to. After submitting, document your submission. This way you can go back and verify that your link was added without bugging the webmaster. You will also come across the same sites (if they are good) in lots of different places. You probably won’t remember every directory you submitted to, so it is important to keep your work well documented and organized. Be patient, and keep searching…there’s a lot more pages out there that your site could be listed on!

“Starting Points”

[directory.google.com...]
[directory.yahoo.com...]
[dmoz.org...]
[isedb.com...]
[jayde.com...]

Additional Tips
Another way of finding sites to link to yours is to find sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for:
"add url" "your keywords"
Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following sets of search phrases:
add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link

In addition, you can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. So, try replacing the "add url" search phrase with one of the following page names:
addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html

I will post my more "advanced" tutorial to pass on to clients if people find this useful.