When engaging in a link exchange campaign it is important to choose your prospective “friendly sites” wisely. The sites should be reputable and should have a related subject matter or be in a similar industry. Ideally, they should also have a high PageRank so a link from them means a nice glass of link juice for you.

The process of finding the candidates' sites by Googling for targeted keywords can be dull and time consuming. I tried to come up with a way to speed up the process and came up with a simple solution.

I tried this method for one of my sites, chicagoconcretecontractors.com. This is a site that provides estimates on concrete construction in Chicago. I have done some on-site optimization here, and through a combination of a good domain name, keyword-rich content, and rewritten URLs, I managed to get some very nice results for keyphrases such as “Chicago concrete services”, “Chicago concrete construction,” and their permutations.

This was, unfortunately, not enough to get to the first page of Google’s SERP for the most general keyphrase that I needed: “Chicago Concrete.” I decided that some link-building with Chicago Concrete in the anchor text might be called for. I posted a “Friendly Sites” link on my home page and started my link exchange efforts by doing the following:

First, we need to establish what keyword we are looking for. In this case it’s already done, “Chicago Concrete.” Since we don’t want to exchange links with direct competitors, we drop the “Chicago” part and are left with the most generic term, namely “Concrete.”

Now, I could type my keyword in Google to look for concrete companies in other cities and start emailing their respective webmasters about a possible link exchange.  Such an approach usually results in a rather low response rate. It works similarly to cold calls made by a sales person - contacting a client and trying to make a sale. Wouldn’t it be much easier to find a webmaster that is already looking for a link exchange partner?

Of course it would, but how to find one? One can go to some webmaster forums, but going over hundreds of link exchange threads and looking for a partner in a similar industry can be a bit tedious. Once again, Google provides us with a simpler solution.

We can use the “allinurl:” option in the search engine.  We type in allinurl (displays websites that have keywords in the URL): Links (we’re looking for a website that engages in link exchange, so we’re assuming it already has a links page) “Targeted Keyword” (the assumption here is that the right website would have the keyword included in its URL). In case of our Concrete site, we would type in: “allinurl:links concrete” and voila! The first result is a directory at Concrete Contractor. If we use a different keyword that doesn’t give us such good results, we can further refine the search and type in “allinurl:add link” or “allinurl:add url” all followed by the targeted keyword or keyphrase. Alternatively, to broaden the search results, we can use the “inurl:” function that will show us the websites that have the first keyword in their URL and are related to other keywords without necessarily having them included in the domain or the file names.

When doing a search for our concrete campaign, “allinurl:links concrete” outputs 1,190 results. Search query “inurl:links concrete” broadens the SERP to a much bigger number of 253,000 results. Thus, depending on our preference, we can broaden or narrow down the pool of prospective candidate websites. It all depends on the specific industry/keyword and our current needs.

If we only want to target websites with a certain PageRank, we can launch our Firefox browser and install an add-on like SEO Quake that manipulates the SERPs in the user’s browser to display SEO-related information about the results, including… you guessed it, the PR!

In conclusion, using all the above techniques, with one search query, we get a list of websites that are related to our target industry, have links pages (i.e., are interested in link exchange), and we already know their PageRank even before clicking on the result link!

I thought that this was a nice little trick and my coworkers liked it as well, so I decided to share it with YOUmozzers. Hope you’ll find it useful!

Thanks,

-Konrad