Give webmasters and bloggers some link love in order to make them discover your site!

All right, we admit the headline is a bit cynical, but it is based on our own experience as webmasters and hence our own vanity. We are talking about a totally natural human trait here: We all want to be recognized for what we do. We all want to be loved.

Think about it: As webmasters and bloggers we spend an obscene amount on time on our websites: planning, designing, researching and writing.

No wonder we are glad when someone notice us. No wonder we are flattered when someone write about us or link to us. And that is the key to webmaster vanity exploitation!

This is the objective:

You want other sited to write about your site. You want other sites to link to your pages. You want PR and you want PR.

This is the problem:

In a large number of niches you are competing with hundreds, if not thousands, of web sites (search engine marketing being one of these niches). How do you get on the radar of the sites and blogs that really count?

You can send them an email, you say, and ask them politely for a link. But do you have any idea of how many such mails the most popular bloggers and columnists get every day?

We can assure you that most of them have learned to ignore all but the most relevant of such requests — if they look at any at all.

Here’s the solution:

Still, there are ways of making them notice.

Most of them do their best to keep track on who is reading them and who is linking to them, mainly to see if there actually are anyone out there noticing what they are doing, or — in some cases — to document the legitimacy of their work to bosses and colleagues.

They normally keep track of their own popularity by the following means:

They will study their log files, normally by using web analytics software or online tools like Google Analytics. These tools will tell them which sites have brought them traffic during a specific period.

If they use modern blog software like Wordpress they will take a look at blog search engines like Technorati. Technorati and Blogpulse will list other blogs that are linking to them.

They may also search for their own site’s name using Google Blog Search and other blog search engines.

Some bloggers may also make use of linkbacks, where the blog or publishing software is used to inform other blogs about new posts and vice versa. Trackback is the most popular of these methods (although it has become prey to spam).

Finally, Webmasters may use tools found at Google Webmaster Central or the Yahoo! Site Explorer to track inbound links to their site.

And this is the recipe:

All you have to do to make them notice your site, is to link to them.

If your readers click on these links, your target will normally notice. And if your visitors don’t click… well, one extra click made by yourself will not ruin your web site statistics.

If you yourself use blog or publishing software, make sure that you have an RSS feed that can be indexed by the major blog search engines. Sign up for an account at Technorati and register your blog.

If you have a news site, try to get listed in Google News.

Where’s the catch?

Yes, there is a catch. To get the webmaster or blogger to write about your site or link back to you, your content must be relevant to their topic of interest. And yes, it should preferably be of high quality.

Moreover, you must never forget that your main audience is not webmasters combing through their log files, but your regular readers. If you fill your articles with irrelevant links, or links to sites they are bound to dislike, you will loose your regular visitors, and that defeats the purpose of this exercise.

Does Pandia fall for this trick?

You bet! We have found many of the search engine oriented sites included in our mega search engine site blogroll by these means.

If we find blogs and new sites related to searching and search engine marketing that provide substantial coverage and analysis we may even include their RSS feed in our own personal web feed news reader.

Among our latest “discoveries” you will find Big Oak SEO Blog and SEO Theory.

We normally come back to such sites over and over again, and often include their articles in our Recommended Reading section in the right hand column of the Pandia Search Engine News home page.

But that’s not all! Those links are also included in our weekly Weekend Wrap-up. You will find many search engine oriented sites doing the same, Search Engine Land, Researchbuzz and Marketing Pilgrim included.

The main reason for these outbound links is to guide our readers to useful information online. After all, we do not have the capacity to cover everything by ourselves. That being said, they also serve as honey pots for webmasters and bloggers that might be interested in what we provide.

A win/win/win/win situation

So, are we really cynical? Nah, we don’t think so. This is more of a win/win situation, really:

Our readers win because we provide them with relevant information, the sites we link to win because they get link love (and their writers stronger egos), and we win because our site gets noticed.

Actually, even the search engines win as long as the links are relevant and leads to high quality pages. After all, that is what PageRank is all about.