This post is about getting backlinks from webpages upon which we don’t have any control and by utilising search engines as a backlink tool.

Methods for building artifficial backlinks to your webpages like using forum threads, article directories, social bookmarking will not be covered.

Finding Link Partners, in a nutshell

1. Use DMOZ and Yahoo Directory and identify your competition; other submission directories can be consulted.

2. Use Yahoo! Site Explorer and do a backlink analisys for the competing websites in your niche; sites that are curently linking to your competition are places from where you want your own website to get backlinks.

3. Contact the webmasters of those sites and make them an offer for establishing a backlink on relevant pages for keywords you’re optimizing content for. Here’s how:

• write short emails or phone them; let them see you know their website, maybe spot one or two flaws in their content (e.g. broken links discovered with a bot for broken links);
• offer to exchange articles; be sure to use your unique writing tone, even state some personal opinions that will contradict your link partner’s views on a topic. Don’t over do it, though;
• offer to make a body text link exchange; linking from the body text is very effective for Google optimization.

Additional tips for optimizing your backlinks portfolio

> make sure that your existing backlinks are not hurting your SEO ranking. e.g. backlinks from sites that have no authority but still stack one hundred links on a page – that’s a parasite you must get rid off. That’s also true for article distribution. Don’t expedite the process using an article submission software by blasting your content to a kzillion of dodgy article directories. Stick with only the top 50 directories and your website will gain authority through association.

> make sure you link to quality websites; a quality website is considered to be one that receives around 25.000 to 30.000 visits per month;

> for checking your competition’s backlink sources, I recommend using Yahoo! Site Explorer instead of Google.

Although Google utilizes current backlink information to index webpages, it doesn’t make public the complete backlink network of a site. In other words it counts some links that don’t show up in the backlink statistics (in Webmaster Central) and it doesn’t count some links despite their existence is made public. The reason behind this policy is that Google doesn’t want you to know what makes a “quality link” from its stand point.

We know this – a “quality link” is a link that is on a webpage with a PageRank of 4 or higher. Still, a real PR4 can show up on Google toolbar as being a PR0 – a result of Googles conspiracy when it comes to evaluating links.

If you still want to give it a try with Google, here are some commands for search bar and the relevancy they carry:

link: www.domain.com – the default command for a link list and used by Google Toolbar.

links: www.domain.com – the values this command generates are invalid.

link: *domain.com – although this command may seem to be valid by delivering a number of links your site has, the number is not accurate.

.domain. – www.domain.com – this give the complete number of links and references that Google has in its index to your website. However, this number will be inflated since any text reference (non-links included) to your domain will show in the link list. Worth mentioning that this is the command of choice for the majority of SEOs that use Google to get the number of links pointing to their website.

I suggest doing your backlinks analysis using Yahoo! Site Explorer and even Webmaster Central instead of using these commands. This will avoid hacking your backlink report with irrelevant entries.

Any sneaky SEO tricks of your own that you care to share with us?