Over the three years that I’ve worked in SEO, I’ve spent god knows how much time looking for websites and blogs to work with as part of my link building activity . Now, although it’s important to still undertake more extensive research/seeding too, I adopt the following techniques to find link prospects quickly and easily.

Google Adwords Placement Tool

If you’re stuck for websites that you could work with to obtain some links, why not look through the list of sites in your Google Adwords account, using the placement tool. This data is readily available and often contains sites that you might not have seen before.

If you’re already doing display advertising, you have an ‘in’ straight away, just mention that you saw your ad on their website and wanted to ask about collaborating, posting guest content, placing your infographic etc.

To access this data simply login to your Google Adwords account, go to the placement tool and select your preferred topic/sector.

Google Analytics Data:

Looking at the websites that are referring traffic to you in Google Analytics is a great way of identifying opportunities and maximising existing coverage.

I would recommend filtering out the sites that you’re familiar with, having a look at the links from the remaining sites and then getting in touch with the ones you like to thank them for sending traffic to your website. Sending a quick email saying thank you and potentially suggesting further involvement with their site (could wait to see if you hear back before doing this) will help to start off the relationship.

Google Alerts:

Setting up Google Alerts for your brand, target keywords and maybe ever your competitors is fairly standard practice – but Google Alerts can offer so much more…

Setting up alerts for more advanced queries, things like ‘keyword “guest post”’ or ‘keyword “write for us”’ is a great way of getting new prospects sent to you via email on a regular basis. This technique is efficient and you can adapt the terms you’re receiving alerts for based on the kind of prospects you’re getting.

Blogrolls:

Once you’ve got your list of blogs, or maybe after doing a few basic searches, you can start to look over the sites to see who they’re listing on their blogroll.

Remember, not all bloggers are familiar with SEO, so some really good blogs and sites can be hard to find initially, which is why this method is so effective. I’ve found some great websites from looking through blogrolls and if you’ve already built a relationship with the original blogger, you can ask them to introduce you.

 

 

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