rogerd - 5:58 pm on Jun 12, 2001 (gmt 0)

That is often the catch with a business link-pop campaign - the best links are competitors, and most probably won't link to you. Even if they would, you almost certainly don't want to place a prominent link to them on your site.

I'd do some searching on your keywords and see if you can find some potential link partners. Perhaps there are some sites that are not in competition because of geographic location or market orientation. Or, perhaps web design resource sites would be relevant but not competitive. If you can find some classes of sites that seem to fit, you can then try crafting searches to find more. You could even turn a tool like Zeus loose, although I suspect it would be hard to tune Zeus to skip over competitive sites. There is another thread about Zeus going here, or you can also check out the Zeus Review [aim-pro.com] at AIM-pro.

Another idea: the computer and internet category at LinkTopics.com is the biggest one and might be one quick fix, although (as many have pointed out) linktopics might be risky if any SEs start targeting reciprocal link programs. I think LT does the best job of anyone - there is plenty of descriptive text, all links are appropriate to their category, there is a search function, etc. They are really trying to make it more than a reciprocal link farm. (I have actually had some hits off my listings on other sites.) You also have good control of header, footer, and CSS settings, so you can integrate it in the site. Of course, some of the people there will be your competitors. You have to link to the pages, but the link doesn't have to be on your home page.