What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should You Care?
What theme relevancy means is the site that places a link to yours (an vice versa) should be relevant or related to your sites "theme". Ideally, your link partner's Website should complement, but not compete with whatever you are offering.
For instance, if you are selling blue widgets, it makes sense to get a link from a site selling widget accessories. Or, if you are selling Search Engine Optimization services, it's a good idea to get links pointing to SEO-related articles, search engines news and forums. And, in both examples, it's definitely NOT a good idea to exchange links with casino, gambling, or real estate sites.
This is not to say that blue widget buyers never gamble or never purchase real estate. But if they came to your site looking for your products or services such as blue widgets or SEO services, there's probably one chance out of a million they are interested in casinos or real estate right now.
This is how your site's visitors would have thought, and this is how search engines think it should be. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other major search engines have been designed with one purpose — to provide value to their users, which means relevant, accurate search results. Their algorithms may — and will — change, but this underlying principle will remain the same.
A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right?
Wrong! This is a misconception that can easily get you in trouble. This approach could bring you short-term benefits 2 or 3 years ago, but major search engines (especially Google) have gotten a lot smarter since then.
If you still think theme relevancy is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, well, think again. Get a hundred unrelated links pointing to your site, and several things will happen, none of which involves high rankings for you:
* Google will simply not count these links when computing your ranking. This is the best thing that could happen since it doesn't involve penalizing your site;
* Google will think (justifiably) that your site belongs to a different theme (say, gambling) and treat it accordingly. This could mean your site will go up in gambling-related search results, and down in the results you seek (such as blue widget results). Now, you don't want this, do you?
* With the last Google algo update (dubbed "Big Daddy"), Google will decide (again, justifiably) you are trying to trick search engines and will simply drop your site from its index. Ouch. That was definitely NOT intended.
So here's a rule of thumb: Always keep your site's visitors in mind when running your link building campaigns. Try to get into your visitors' shoes and think what resources they would be interested in. Would they be interested in casino sites? No? Then don't do it.
How Do You Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To You?
Easy. There are several ways you can do it:
1. Do a search in major search engines such as Google using your niche keywords. Scan the results, copy the URLs you are interested in into a spreadsheet, wash rinse and repeat.
2. Visit a good link directory. Link directories are human-compiled directories of sites broken down into categories. DMOZ is an excellent example. Simply find your niche category in a directory, and search for relevant link partners there.
3. A trick you could use is examine your competition. Your competitors, who are selling, say, red widgets, most likely have other sites that link to them. You can use the LINK:WWW.COMPETITOR.COM command in Google, for example, to find out who.
