Link building 101 – ways to find links

Many people know that acquiring links to your site is very important for SEO. Google loves links… LOVES EM. A link is essentially “a vote” in favor of your site. A link tells Google that someone thinks you’re a good resource – a valuable destination. So, in theory, the more links you have pointing to your site (from quality and related sites!) the higher you will rank.

Sounds simple right? Well,  with all things Google, it’s not. We talked a little bit about what types of links Google likes yesterday so we won’t revisit that today. What we’re going to do is briefly look at a couple of useful tactics for finding ways to get links.

Have you ever looked at the search results for a particular query and wondering why “Bob’s Company” is ranking above you in the results? Rankings can be influenced by many things but a lot of times their rankings have to do with the number of links they have over you. Wouldn’t it be great to find out who is linking to Bob and try to duplicate those successes?

All you need to do is the following: Go to Yahoo search and type in linkdomain:www.bobscompany.com and Yahoo will return a long list of sites that are currently linking to Bob. You can do the same thing on Google by typing in link:www.bobscompany.com and it will return results – although I find that Yahoo returns better results.

Pretty cool huh? Give it a try as a first step in finding ways to get more links to your site. But remember, not all links are equal. You want to find sites that are high quality and related to your niche if possible. That’s not always possible but my point is that you don’t want links from any ol’ site. Low-quality links from “spammy” sites could actually hurt you so be wary.

Good luck! Get those links – go get ’em! Go…