Having high-quality links coming from other sites to your site is an important ingredient in achieving top search placement in Google and Bing. By "high quality" we mean links from other sites that are respectable, highly-visited, and exist because they have something useful to offer users, beyond just serving up a big collection of links.

A great way to find such sites is to see where your competitors are getting their links. You can view incoming links to other sites by using a tool called Open Site Explorer. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

(Open Site Explorer is a limited-use free service put out by MOZ. Of course, they want to get you to sign up for their paid service!)

Simply go to Open Site Explorer and enter your competitor's domain name and click Search.

You will see a list of sites linking to whatever domain you enter.

You can click through to these sites and assess whether you think they would have an interest in linking to your site. If they look like a good candidate, you can reach out to them and make your case for why they should link to your site.

At the very least, you can study and learn from what your competitors are doing to make their sites linkworthy and attract high-quality incoming links.

Marketing Bites are short actionable tips to help you market your business. Each Bite contains a marketing idea and an easy to complete action. The Marketing Bite is emailed weekly to subscribers.