Link building strategy: Locating similar sites

High quality popular blogs set the pace for all other related and similar blogs in any niche. Link popularity is the total number of blogs that link to a blog, and major search engines now factor link popularity into their relevancy algorithms. Consequently, increasing the number of high quality, relevant sites which link to your site will improve your search engine rankings, and that’s why it’s an integral part of any link building strategy. Therefore, locating high quality similar blogs is an important step to becoming a better blogger.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Seven ways to benefit

In a nutshell locating and visiting high quality similar blogs frequently will assist you to:

locate and link to authoritative posts in order to backlink to them in your own posts;
leave meaningful comments on posts and create relationships with like minded bloggers;
determine which blogs similar blogs to yours link to;
determine where inbound links to similar blogs are coming from;
learn valuable tips for improving your blog theme, structure and post content;
develop an effective link building strategy that encourages bloggers with blogs that link to similar blogs, to also link to yours;
determine who comprises a potential readership in order to develop an effective link building strategy aimed at increasing targeted reader traffic to your blog.

This article will introduce you an interesting way of finding high quality blogs related to your own – similar site search. It’s free tool that’s easy to use. You can find similar sites to add to your favorite websites by simply entering the URL.

About Similar Site Search

Similar site search is mainly based on user annotations or tags on websites. For a given url, the search engine will find websites that have the closest tag match. Therefore, the accuracy of the search result heavily depends on the accuracy of the tags. We consider the tags on a website to be more accurate when the site is tagged by more users. You can help by tagging websites in our search engine.

About the Confidence Level

low : The site being searched has been tagged less than 50 times. Tag based search is used. We suggest you add tags when you find tags are not accurate.
medium : The site being searched has been tagged less than 100 times. Tag based search is used. Starting from this level, the search result probably will satisfy most users.
high : The site being searched has been tagged more than 100 times. Tag based search is used. Adding tags will have little impact on the search results. However, you can use search options to let search engine ignore certain tags.

About the Similarity Score

Similarity score ranges from 0% to 100%, with bigger number meaning higher similarity. This score is only a suggestive number whose accuracy depends on the confidence level. We consider the following factors when computing the similarity: tag similarity, number of matched tags, and number of tags.

There is also an experimental Firefox add-on download link and a bookmarklet link.

Other means of locating similar blogs

Google Blog Search
Keyword searches of Google, Yahoo, and Bing ( add +wordpress or + typepad, etc. to your searches)
Keyword searches using niche search engines
Keyword searches of blog directories and forums
Keyword search twitter
Keyword search friendfeed
Bloglines is an aggregator of syndicated feeds, and as most blogs publish an RSS feed automatically, it’s a good place to search for quality resources.

Note: If you need some help understanding what SEO is about and links to some resources you can use, then a good place to start the learning process is by reading this recent post: Blogging: Learning SEO is worth the effort . The resources in that post you use to determine the status of your own blog can also be used to assess similar blogs.

The Golden Rule of Networking is: Give before expecting to receive.

Effective networking is built a foundation of building relationships leading to reciprocity. In other words, if you want bloggers with similar blogs to link to your posts, then link to their posts first. If you want them to comment on and/or promote your posts, then comment on their posts and promote them first.