Consider chess. As most people (even those who don't play the game) know, the secret to becoming a Grand Master (the chess equivalent of a Super Bowl MVP) is thinking many moves ahead, more moves ahead than your opponent can think. What makes this enormously difficult is the fact that the various pieces - like running backs, to use another football analogy - all have different moves. Some can only move forward in a straight line, some can move only diagonally, some can leap over opposing pieces and move sideways and one, the Queen, can move just about anywhere at all. As is obvious, this makes predicting the down-the-line reaction to any specific move both challenging and essential.

...predicting the effect of any of your linking moves on your web traffic, search-engine ranking and, most important, sales is not quite that challenging.

Fortunately, predicting the effect of any of your linking moves on your web traffic, search-engine ranking and, most important, sales is not quite that challenging. But it is equally essential. For example, a basic reciprocal link between your home page and another home page could be considered a pawn. Generally speaking, pawns move in a straight line -- except when capturing another piece - and are the most simple, easy-to-understand - pieces on the chessboard. Home-page-to-home-page links are also simple, straightforward and, like pawns, can have a tremendous influence on the game's outcome.

Now let's take a look at the knight. The knight is quite an interesting character. He moves two steps forward, backward or sideways and one-step diagonally. What makes him even more fascinating - and unique, as far as chess goes - is that he doesn't need a clear path to his destination; he can jump over other pieces standing in his way. In terms of linking strategy, the knight most resembles a content (or deep) link, which takes people clicking it directly to a page on your site that contains information of specific interest to them. Like the knight, the content link begins as a straight link from one website to another website but along the way it changes direction, skipping over the homepage and other pages on the target site, to land on a particular pre-determined page.

This brings us to the bishop, a chess piece which can move all the way from one end of the board to the other - but only in a diagonal line. Because the bishop moves on the slant, it can best be compared to an oblique link - a link to a site which may not, at first glance, be an obvious link partner for your site.

Let's say you raise Golden Retrievers. Obvious link partners include generic sites about dogs, sites about dog care, Golden Retriever affinity group sites, the American Kennel Club site, pet food sites and many others. But there are scores of other potential link partners which may not be so obvious.. motels which allow dogs in their rooms, sites which list any special dietary requirements for Goldens, sites put up by dog handlers who specialize in showing Goldens, sites which publish dog show and agility trial event calendars, etc.

Let's look at one more example. In this scenario, your business is e-tailing skin-care products and you've already got a couple of nice, productive link pages connected to all the "usual suspects." But you want to build on that, you want to improve your linking environment to provide a greater benefit to end users and to show Google and the other search engines that you have one of the most serious, comprehensive skin-care-product sites on the web.

Ferreting out link partners with sites obliquely related to yours can be very effective.

Ferreting out link partners with sites obliquely related to yours can be a very effective way to achieve the above aim. In the skin care example, you could look for sites about the history of cosmetics, sites discussing changing standards in body adornment, sites devoted to the ingredients (aloe, apricot kernels, collagen etc.) common to skin emollients. Such "oblique" sites may not, in themselves, score a ton of hits or have high search-engine rankings. But they will contain content relevant to yours and increase your site's appeal to both customers and search engines. As an added bonus, many of these sites tend to be informational rather than commercial in nature, eliminating the possibility that they will also be competitors.

The one problem is that some oblique sites - most of them in some areas of interest - tend to be obscure in the sense that finding them can be somewhat difficult. For example, let's say you're looking for oblique partners for your Golden Retriever kennel site. You take a few minutes for some blue-sky brainstorming (i.e. thinking out of the box) and decide that a site about controlling fleas on Golden Retrievers might be a good partner. Googling Golden Retrievers or Golden Retriever Fleas is likely to get you hundreds of thousands of returns (262,000 in the case of Golden Retriever Fleas) with no practical way for you to determine which ones are most specific to the topic at hand. Making matters more tedious, the first several dozen returns on this type of search are likely to be sites you already know about and may already be linked to - like the various Golden Retriever clubs and rescue societies around the country. Also filling out the first x-number of return pages will be links to the Golden page on numerous generic dog sites that might not be optimal link partners for you.

Query-based searching is an incredibly simple process that requires nothing more than formulating your SE query as a question.

One solution for separating the wheat from the chaff is by using what most experts call the "vertical-search" technique, though we personally like to think of it as "query-based" searching. Whatever you call it, it is an incredibly simple process that requires nothing more than formulating your SE query as a question instead of a few dislocated key words and using quotation marks to filter out generic responses.

The easiest way to explain this is with some Google math:

Golden Retriever Fleas - 262,000 returns
"Golden Retriever" flea control - 159,000 returns
How do I control fleas on Golden retrievers - 55,900 returns
How do I control fleas on "Golden retrievers" - 986 returns
How do I "control fleas on Golden retrievers" - 68 returns

"Control fleas on Golden Retrievers" will get you the exact same 68 returns as How do I "control fleas on Golden retrievers", the important thing is to think in terms of asking a question when you formulate what you are going to ask Google to deliver. Like every other information service since the dawn of time, Google will only provide the answers you want if you ask the right question. Unlike paper "search engines," however, Google has an almost incalculable amount of data to draw its answers from.

Go to the Encyclopedia Britannica index and you may find ten, 20, a hundred citations for fleas. It might be a bit tedious, but in less than an hour you could paw through the printed books checking each reference until you find one that is useful. Enter the single word "flea" in Google, however, and you'll get 30,900,000 "index references." We tried to calculate exactly how many average lifetimes it would take to check them all out, but couldn't figure out where to start. There are just too many variables, bandwidth speed being just one.

Fortunately, search engines - unlike encyclopedias -- provide an almost infinite number of ways to refine and filter searches. By taking advantage of these you can squeeze those approximately 31 million flea references down to 68 links to Websites that might significantly benefit you as a link partner. Sixty-eight is a workable number. A quick look at the summaries will probably leave you with no more than 15 to actually visit, probably for no more than four minutes each. Once that's done, you'll probably wind up with six or more to send a reciprocal link invitation to. Of those six, two, three or four are likely to respond positively and turn into productive linking partners for you. Not a bad return for an hour investment in practicing the fine art of oblique linking.

Discuss this article in the LinkPartners.com Discussion Forums