So I recently set up a bunch of new websites and wanted to link out to a few authoritative sites right off the start. I added various numbers of outbound links to each channel, but after setting up a number of them I got pretty quick at researching where I should link at, even when I did not know a topic that well.

Outbound links are like a gimme in SEO. It's fairly hard to get the right type of people to link at a new site unless you bribe them or it's a great site, but just about anyone can improve their web community by linking out to some of the better resources on their topic.

Terms like PageRank leakage and bad neighborhood have made some webmasters become greedy or paranoid with their link popularity to the point where their sites become harder to link at because they are islands.

How do you find the best resources to link at?

What do the Various Major Engines Like?
My first port of call is Myriad Search. Search for the core phrase your site is focused on, synonyms, and phrases slightly broader in scope than your keyword phrase.

If you are in a hyper competitive field MSN tends to bring up some fairly spammy results, but sometimes seeing the results mixed together gives you a nice flavor of what they all like and sometimes you will find a nugget ranked at #7 in Yahoo! or #6 in Ask that all the other engines missed.

Unfortunately I am a fairly default searcher (primarily just using Google) but using Myriad helps me get an idea of what people can get away with (as far as content quality goes) in some of the engines.

Some people recommend other meta search engines, but like Berkeley, I think most meta search engines have way to many ads in the content area to be of any use.

Research, Research, Research!
Yahoo! Mindset allows you to bias your search results toward commercial or information result. Tilt that puppy full on research and see what sites they think are informational in nature.

Is that Page Created by the Government?
The Yahoo! Advanced Search page makes it easy to search just .gov or just .edu resources (or both at once). Sometimes this will be a miss, but I have found many great resources using the Yahoo! Advanced Search page.

Directories:
Many directories have picks or a star on favorite sites. DMOZ and the Yahoo! directories are the two most well known directories. You can also browse the Open Directory Project organized by PageRank using the Google Directory.

Don't forget some of the smaller higher quality directories created by librarians. LII is a killer site.

Vertical Authorities:
If you run a finance related site odds are pretty good that you can find something good at Fool.com, MarketWatch.com, Forbes.com, etc.

If you run an automotive site it is easy to link at Edmunds, Nada, Kelly Blue Book, etc.

To drill down go to a relevant vertical authority site and do a site level search for information related to your topic.

Broad Authorities:
When all else fails I like to link to sites with great overall authority scores if they have relevant pages or channels. Some examples include:

• Yahoo! Directory

• DMOZ
• Wikipedia
• About.com

Other sites which have content on a wide array of topics like Answers.com, Topix.net, HowStuffWorks.com, and Britanica.com et al are also easy to link at.

I believe this site lists some of the top .com's.

That is about as far as I have gone with most of these new sites, but sometimes you may want to hunt further if you have an uber spammy topic like cash advance or are trying to go further in depth on a topic that is already well covered. Some other ideas...

Local Search:
If your searches are local in nature you may some of the best information by using regional search databases.

Filetype:
Don't forget that you can specify filetype. Spamming is a game of margins, and on the whole the average .doc or .PDF is going to be of higher quality than the average web page.

Search Engine Showdown has a good chart of search engine features.

Related Sites / Pages:
When you find a good site you can see which sites are related to it. Use a tool like the Google related search or the Touchgraph Google Browser.

Social Bookmarking:
There are a variety of social bookmarking websites which can help you find that key resource you need to reference to complete an article. De.lici.us is probably the most popular.

Link Socially: Tip for Blogs:
Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, Ice Rocket, and Google Blogsearch and Yahoo! Blogsearch are a few of the more well known blog search engines.

If you are running a blog or some type of a topical channel do not forget to use ego stroke techniques in your content and citations. Even if your idea is better than someone else's, or your read their idea after you came up with yours still give them a bit of link love.

Sometimes mentioning a prominent blogger (saying they are so right, they are hosed, they are normally spot on but are messed up on issue x) equates to a quality link back and many secondary links from various non clued up ditto heads :)

I have not tried this idea out yet, but St0n3y has a new content exchange link exchange idea.

Some people who would be willing to trade content are too lazy to write an article for your site, so what you do is write an article for their site which links back to your site and then write most of an article for your site to link to them.

Leave out a section for pointers or tips and let them write a pointer or two including links back to their site.

Martinibuster: Link Development is Dead

THEY don't want you to promote your site. Anything that smells promotional is getting whacked at the knees.

Justilien: Using Google’s Love Affair with Quality Content to Garner Links

Jim Boykin is even using email spam and fax spam as content! Treehugger. ;)

A friend of mine mentioned how the noise level in SEO forums has gone from around 95% to about 99%. I think it is largely due to a shift from content optimization to content creation (and remember that this is a site selling a book on optimization, so me saying this is not in any way to my benefit).

Here is why there is a large shift from optimization to creation

• The ease which content can be published: It took me less than 2 hours to teach my mom Blogger, Bloglines, rss, xml, etc. She now blogs every day.

• the ease in which content can be commented on and improved in quality
• the casual nature in which links flow toward real content
• the massive increase in the number of channels and quantity of information makes us more inclined to look for topical guides to navigate the information space
• the ease with which content can be monetized has greatly increased. AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, Chitika, new Amazon Product Previews, affiliate programs, link selling, direct ads, donations, (soon enough Google Wallet for microcontent), etc.
• contextual ad programs teach the content publishers to blend links, which has the net effect of...
  • short term increase in revenues for small publishers

  • until users trust links less
  • at which point in time users will be forced to go back to primary trusted sources (ie: one of the few names they trust in the field or a general search engine like Google)
• it is getting increasingly expensive to find quality link inventory that works in Google to promote non content sites, and margins are slimming for many of those creating sites in hyper competitive fields
• the algorithms are getting harder for people new to the field to manipulate
• around half of all search queries are unique. most hollow spam sites focus on the top bits whereas natural published information easily captures the longer queries / tail of search
• duplicate content filters are aggressively killing off many product catalog and empty shell affiliate sites
• as more real / useful content is created those duplicate content and link filtering algorithms will only get better
• general purpose ecommerce site owners will have the following options:
  • watching search referrals decrease until their AdWords spends increases

  • thickening up their sites to offer far more than a product catalog
  • switching to publishing content sites
• and the market dynamics for Google follow popular human behavior, even for branded terms or keyword spaces primarily created by single individuals
  • the term SEO Book had 0 advertisers and about 0 search volume when I launched this site

  • this site got fairly popular
  • SEO Book is now one of my most expensive keyword phrases

As long as it is original, topical, and structured in a non wild card replace fashion content picks up search traffic and helps build an audience.

I am not trying to say that optimization is in any way dead, just that the optimization process places far more weight on content volume and social integration than it did a year or two ago.

The efficiencies Google are adding to the market will kill off many unbranded or inefficient businesses. One of my clients has an empty shell product site and does no follow up marketing with the buyers. I can't help but think that there needs to be some major changes in that business or in 3 to 6 months we won't be able to compete on the algorithmic or ppc front without me being very aggressive.

Dan Thies was recently interviewed by Pandia. One big thing he stresses is the concept of opportunity optimization, and how many people focused on SEO are missing out:

Beginners have a hard time looking at the rest of the picture. Their #1 problem is probably not traffic, it's conversion, usability, opt-ins, follow-up, pricing, making the right offer.

You can use search engine marketing to help you solve these problems, but if you don't solve them you will eventually fail. Those who make the most profit per visitor have the most resources to compete for rankings and ad placement.

When I speak with someone who wants to improve their rankings, I usually ask if they do pay-per-click. Invariably, the answer is "no, we can't afford that." The bad news is that if your website can't convert well enough to support a PPC campaign, you'll often find that SEO is even more costly, especially in the short term.

To be honest I am pretty guilty of not maximizing monetization per pageview. I struggle a bit with the issue of trying to write about what I find new and interesting when if I dumbed down most of the blog posts to be more fitting toward newbies my sales could probably double or triple.

The people who vote with their link popularity to help boost your authority are frequently not the same people who buy your goods and/or services. What are the best ways you have found to be linkable and target new people without seeming overtly boring, etc? Content in multiple formats? Multiple similar channels? Free email tips?

The low cost of traffic from quality SEO can be as much of a problem as a blessing, because it allows people to get away with being fairly inept in other business fascets to the point that eventually when the SEO techniques they use no longer work that the only solution is to close the business.

link from TW