Tips for finding the best pages to get links from.

I was giving some training to my link team yesterday and I gave them a very nice tip…..I’ve been debating on weather or not to publish (publically) this technique, or save it for my next speaking gig (and give it away then)….or to just keep this technique to my own team…..but hey, we’re all friends right? Here’s a cool link building tip for my readers.

So you want a link from Someones Site A to Your Site B
What page on Site A do you want your link from
….that is the question.

….here is my answer.

I like getting links from sub pages of other sites….maybe even more than getting a link from someones homepage. My feeling is that most links to other sites (off of someones homepage) is going to be an “ad” and not counted as much as link within content, from a content page of a site, linking to an inner page of one of my clients sites (Read the page that link links to for some info on that whole philosophy).

So if you’re approaching site A for a backlink to your site B, how do you decide which page from Site A you should be asking for a link from (what page on their site will pass the most value to you?).

There’s 2 main types of pages I’d seek.

The first type I’d find by asking, “What Page on their site is most relevant to the page on my site I’m seeking a link to“.

Here’s how I’d find that: I’d go to google and search [site:theirsite.com keyword phrase] to find the most relevant page. Relevance is a big factor. If I sell Green Widgets, and they’ve got a specific page on Green widgets, that would be a great page to get a link from.

The Second type of page I’d seek is the one with the most “power”…call it “backlinks”, call it “trust rank”, call it “quality indicators”….all of those.

Here’s how I’d find any websites most powerful inner page.

I’d go to Yahoo and search [site:theirsite.com]

The nice thing about Yahoo is that they tend to list pages in order of importance. Same goes for a “linkdomain” search in Yahoo (the best backlinks tend to be towards the top of results). This hold true for a “Site:” search with Yahoo. The best “internal pages” tend to be listed first.

These “best internal pages” tend to be the pages that have the most external backlinks to those pages.

Let me show you an example of this. One of my link team members was seeking an ad for a “music” client of our from another music site. She showed me the nice relevant page that she was seeking this advertisement from, and I ran a site:theirsite.com search in Yahoo and found that the most powerful page of the site (even more powerful than the homepage) was a subpage about a competition that this company held in early 2005. Since this was the first page listed in the “site:” search, I decided to dive a bit deeper and I went back to Yahoo and did a search for [link:http://theirsite.com/contest.html] and found that that page had a lot of backlinks from other sites (including 4 .edu’s!).  So we ended up writing to the guy saying we wanted our ad on 2 pages of his site….the nice relevant page, and also the contest page of 2005 as a kinda “throw in”. The guy went for it and we got the best of both worlds, the most relevant, and the most powerful subpage of the site.

Funny thing was, the next site my link member was working out a deal on was another music site that again, after we did the “site:” search, we found that they too had a content in 2005 that was thier second most powerful page next to the homepage….same deal as above…we got the original ad on the asking page, and as an added bonus, they threw in the same ad on thier old “contest” page.

So to recap….in asking for links from a site…pass on the homepage (too expensive, and near impossible to get it worked into the content of the homepage) – aim for the “most relevant page” (google [site:theirsite.com keyword keyword]) and also aim for the “most trusted, powerful page” via searching Yahoo for [site:theirsite.com] and let yahoo sort them by importance.

More: This is stuff that you have to do by hand (forget automating link building, keep it under the radar, and of course you don’t want links on “link pages”, and you want your ads to be within content, and if you can slip in some good co citation, even better.

What are your thoughts?