How to find good “do follow” links
Jan 25, 2010 SEO
As I keep harping on about it; getting good quality back links to your site is the best way to help climb the rankings of the major search engines.
When I first started out, I just indiscriminately sent spammy emails to webmasters or posted comments on blogs. Obviously this did not work, so I set about to become a link building master! I’m nowhere near that yet but I do think that I have come on leaps and bounds and I would like to share with you a couple of really useful tools that I use.
If your building links for SEO purposes then you need to be able to find good quality links from established sites that will pass on some link juice.
Here is how I do it -
Firstly, you need to download and install the Quirk Search Status plugin for Firefox. This free tool will highlight links on a website that are “no follow”. So when you are researching a potential site for a link request you will know immediately whether to bother or not.
I will head on over to Google and enter the main keyword that I want to rank for. eg “computer desks”
Starting in the number one position, I copy the web address and head over to Link Diagnosis where I paste the address to get a comprehensive back link report.
The brilliant thing about Link Diagnosis is that not only does it give us all our competitors back links it also lists them in order of page rank and link strength. We can also see whether a link is “no follow”.
Now the hard work really begins! After exporting the Link Diagnosis results into a csv file I will slowly work through the websites one by one (I don’t go lower than PR3 ). I will have a look at the site and get a feel for it and hopefully find a “Contact Us” section. I will also double check with the Quirk Search Status plugin that the links on the site actually are “do follow”. If they are “no follow” they are highlighted in red.
Then I will send a friendly email to the webmaster. I always like to mention something relevant so that they know my email is not spam and I have actually looked at the website. I usually don’t ask for a link exchange. I might explain why my site would be of interest to his or her readers and add that they may want to post a link to my site.
Link Building is a time consuming pastime and I try to break it up into small chunks. I aim to send around 10 emails to prospective sites per day. It is also a good idea to keep a spreadsheet so that you can track your progress.
I use Filemaker, and have written a small database so that I can see who I’ve emailed and on what dates etc. If you have a copy of Filemaker it’s pretty easy to do.
Tags: do follow, link building, no follow
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