Link Building Using Search
If you are running out of ideas for your link building campaign and have done the usual methods of hunting for links you might be relieved to know that there is another simple method you might have missed - link building using search.
Link building using search is might be a little time consuming, depending on the amount of results you get, but it does work pretty well. So what exactly should you search for? You should search for:
- your company name;
- your website title;
- your website’s URL; and
- your name
The reason why you should search for these is to find the websites that mention any of the above but fail to link back to you. In most cases (unless you find scrapers) asking the webmaster of that site to link back to your site using the above fields as anchor text will end up in new inbound links for you. If you think about it, it is much easier to get someone who has already mentioned your site to link to you than someone with whom you have no credibility at all.
Problems that may be encountered with this strategy though include:
- getting too many results - It will be time-consuming sifting through all the results to find the sites that does not link back to you.
- having a common name - If your name is pretty common you will get too much noise in the results. Figure out a way to narrow it down so that the results will more or less yield articles that actually mention you and not some other famous person with the same name.
- keeping track of new articles/post mentioning the above search terms - To make sure you keep track of these use Google Alerts for all the search terms you used. This will save you time and effort in the long run since you won’t need to sift through SERPs periodically just to see if there is anything new. As soon as someone mentions you, your company, or your site, you will be immediately become aware of it (at least if indexed by Google - and if not it won’t affect your page rank anyway so there’s no point in running after those) so that you can check whether you got a backlink or not on the spot.
Today is May 13, 2008
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That’s a pretty slick trick. I’ll try it but as I’m nothing special I can’t imagine I’d find much more than some blogger that stole my article from the 5th grade!
This will work a lot better for our client so thanks.
Some great tips… i have been using Google Alerts for this type of approach for a while. If set-up right it can be a great tool to use… just don’t go on holiday or get sick, your email can get clogged up pretty quickly if you have your alerts set to daily!
Google alerts are one of my favourite tools for staying upto date on certain keywords. I especially use it to pull up blog posts containing the keywords I am looking to market and rank for.
It is also a great tool for reputation management allowing you to monitor what the industry is saying about you, your products or your services.