How to Find Inbound Link Worthy Sites Using The Alexa Toolbar

Posted by Karl Foxley on Aug 9, 2009 in Blog, Coaching, Link Building, Online Coaching, SEO | 0 comments

In my previous post I shared with you how you can use Alexa’s Toolbar to track your Alexa traffic rank within your browser. In today’s post I want to reveal another cool feature of Alexa’s Toolbar for finding quality sites for your inbound linking strategy.

Increasing the number of quality links that point toward your website will help increase the credibility of your website from the search engines point of view. Let’s say you have a website that covers search engine optimisation and you get a one way (unreciprocated link) pointing to you from SEOMoz.org, the search engines will see this as a highly credible thumbs up for your site due to the relevancy and quality of the link.

When you install the Alexa Toolbar you will will see a link at the top of your browser bar that says ‘Related Links‘.

This is such a useful tool. Let’s say your niche is SEO and you want to develop relationships with web owners in that area then you would simply follow this process.

I visit a website I know is an authority in search engine optimisation, in this example SEOMoz.org. Now, when the website has loaded into my browser I click on the related links in my browser toolbar.

Now Alexa will show you websites that are similar to the one you are visiting as shown in the picture below.

To increase your chances of finding ‘authority‘ websites in your chosen niche I recommend you download the Google Toolbar as it has a PageRank indicator that you’ll be able to refer to directly from your browser.

This is what the Goog say about PageRank and why it is important:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

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Now combining the power of Alexa’s related links and Google’s PageRank indicator you will be able to find authority sites in your targeted niche.

In the example I gave above, SEOMoz.org has a PageRank of 6, meaning this has a high authority and would be a great site to get a link from.

So how do you build relationships to get that all important one-way quality link. I’m going to cover this more in a future post so I won’t get too detailed here; if the website has a blog then become an active participant, leave comments that provide quality and substance to the blog readers. You could also write a quest post and send it to the blog author and ask if they would like to publish it.

I hope you’ve found todays post useful.

To your success,

Karl