Short Like A Fox

So you want to generate useful one way backlinks to your site. As far as I am concerned there is really no debating the best way to do this. It may seem old fashioned and it takes time, but it works. My surefire strategy can be broken down to one simple step:

1. ASK PEOPLE TO LINK TO YOUR SITE

Okay, maybe that is a little oversimplified. I’ll spread my advice out into a few more steps.

1. Decide on a keyword or phrase that you want your site to rank well on in web searches.
   Example: Let’s imagine that I have an online store that sells model trains, and I want to do well for the phrase “model train store”
2. Find you competition. To do this simply google the keyword(s) that you want to do well with.
   Example: OK, So I google “model train store”
   
   discounttrainsonline.com is the #1 result, so they are the competition I want to gun for.
3. Find sites that link to the competition. To do this google link:SITENAME. You will be presented with a list of sites with incoming links that Google finds to be at least somewhat important.
   OK, so I google link:discounttrainsonline.com, and am presented with a list of sites that link to discounttrainsonline.
4. These sites link to your competition, why shouldn’t they link to you? The best way to get them to link to you is simply to ask. I have found that this method works immediately about 20% of the time. The rest of the time my requests are simply ignored, or I am asked to place a reciprocal link (which I refuse to do). So click on one of the sites that link to your competition, find contact information for the webmaster, and simply ask to be mentioned in the same list that your competition is. NOTE: This obviously won’t work well if your competition is mentioned in the context of an article or post. It works best for lists of similar sites, or ‘blogroll’ type situations.
   Example: So it looks like the site scalemodel.net links to my competition. Opening up that site I see that discounttrainsonline is linked to from the “International List of Scale Model Related Web Sites.” This works perfectly! I have a scale model related web site, and if scalemodel.net is striving to create a complete list, they should actually be happy to link to my site. So my next step is to find contact information, and send whoever runs the site a nice email asking to be added to their list.
5. Repeat. Once you get good at this you will notice what emails work better than others, and you will become really good at finding contact information that can sometimes be buried within a site (this is especially true for blogs). The saying is true: Practice does make perfect.

So you have a website, and for some reason there are similar sites above yours on the Google search rankings, and you can’t figure out why. Something worth looking at is your competitors’ keyword density. Keyword density is simply the amount of times certain keywords appear compared to how many words are on the page. By analyzing the keyword density of sites that are doing better than yours on Google you might get an idea of what you can be doing better.

Of course, keyword density is just one part of the overall SEO strategy. Modern search engines are much too smart to be fooled by keyword stuffing, but by looking at the ratio of successful websites that are similar to yours you might get an idea of how to optimally utilize keywords.

The keyword density analysis tool I like to use can be found at webuildpages.com. It is totally free, and has enough customizable options to fit my needs.

The We Build Pages Keyword Density Tool

So you want to find a list of free directories to add your website to. There are a bunch of good sites including OneWayTextLink.com and Info Vilesilencer. But since you’re here at my site already why not check out the list I have compiled. I personally attempted to list on all of these sites between January and April of 2009.