Curious to know which sites are linking to your competitors or which are the most important link directories? The Search Guru has answers.

Follow these link building strategies to get some link love to your site!

Valentine’s Day is an annual reminder that we all need love. Our websites need love, too – link love, that is. But what link building techniques should you use to get that love?

First and foremost, for an effective link building campaign your site should contain fresh and interesting content, otherwise known as “link bait.” If you offer something worth linking to, then other sites will naturally link to your site. Be sure to include your target keyphrases in your content, too.

Checking your competitors’ sites is one of the best link building strategies to get additional link love.

If a site is linking to your competitor, they may be inclined to link to your site as well, if you ask. But how exactly do you find out how many, and which sites, are linking to your competitors?

Link building techniques using Yahoo! Site Explorer: Part 1

In Yahoo! Site Explorer, you can see the number of sites linking to your competitors. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com, type your competitor’s URL (e.g. http://www.competingsite.com) into the search box, and click “Explore URL.” Then, click the Inlinks button. Choose “Except from this domain” from the first dropdown menu; this will display the number of links coming only from external sites, and will exclude links from other pages in the competitor’s own site.

From the second dropdown menu, choose “Entire Site” to see the number of links going to every page in the competitor’s site:

Or, select “Only this URL” to see the number of links going to the home page only:

Link building techniques using Yahoo! Site Explorer: Part 2

Once you have noted how many links the competing site has compared to your own site, you will want to examine those links to determine if any would be good candidates for your link building campaign. Scan the list of links and click on any you think might be a good fit. The linking site should:

• be relevant to the topic of your site,
• have decent home page PageRank,
• not be a competing site, and
• have less than 100 other outbound links on the page.

In addition, submit your site to The Search Guru’s top 5 most important link directories to help with your link building campaign:

1. Google’s Directory (DMOZ.org)
2. Yahoo!’s Directory (Dir.Yahoo.com)
3. Business Directory (Business.com)
4. Best Of The Web Directory (BOTW.org)
5. JoeAnt Directory (JoeAnt.com)

Put these and other link building strategies to work for your site to increase rankings and traffic. Happy Valentine’s Day from The Search Guru!