There’s this cliche, no man is an island. This can also be true for websites. No website is a web. So one of the important things that website owners need to do in order to maintain or promote their website is to collaborate with other websites.
Lately I did some of these tasks – more of a profiling task so what I did was to basically collect some contact info of other sites given that they meet certain requirements.
So here are some simple steps on how to efficiently collect some basic info from websites that are related to our own site or to the one that we are promoting. There are two main stages for this – getting a list of the sites that are within the our requirements and manually/ automatically retrieving their contact information.
Stage 1 – Obtaining a List of the Sites
Have a list of the specs that you really want
Before starting your research, it is important to set specific targets. So these include PR, Alexa ranking, Page Authority, Domain Authority, Mozrank, etc. there are a lot of stats that should be considered when finding some contact sites or when profiling some other companies.
So in the task that I was mentioning earlier, I checked the PR, Alexa, and of course the content of the site wherein it should be directly related or the same with the site that I am promoting.
Use the right tools
You can choose from a variety of tools that can be downloaded and accessed online. I’ve used Raven Tools and Citation Labs’ Link Prospector tool. These produce different results when doing keyword-based research. These online tools are only available for free on trial version but these are really good because PR, PA, DA, and MozRank are included.
Filter out your data
Although you already have all the tools to gather a lot of data in just several clicks, you still need to conduct thorough filtering out of the data that are generated by the tools that you are using. It’s a must because m,sot of the sites that are included in the “list”, which can be usually exported into an excel or open office calc file.
You can actually perform a manual audit of the sites in your list or you can check the info from these sites by using “data extracting tools”.
Check if the sites are really relevant to your website. This is quite a simple task because you only need to visually assess a site and then check if it’s really related to your website. This is really a manual and painstaking task but it pays off because at this stage you already need to filter out the good sites and those that are useless.
Stage 2 – Retrieval of Contact Info
So by now, we already obtain a final list of the sites which met the cut off. The next stage is the recording of all the contact info from the targeted sites. Of course, the essential info that we need to record includes the email address or contact form, in case that the site doesn’t provide any email address. The contact person should also be recorded, in order to properly address the person. Furthermore, the phone number, 1-800 number, and the fax number should also be included.
Open multiple number of websites at once
In order for you not to open the sites one by one, you can use urlopener.com. You can open several sites in just one click – literally-speaking. But take note that is a limit to the number of sites that you can open.
The fastest way is through the footer
The first thing that should be found is the Contact Us page. And this is usually found in the footer, generally-speaking. It is in this aspect of info research that will really challenge you because of the variety of site layout that you can encounter and because of the fact that most websites “hide” this info as much as possible.
Conclusions
These are just some of the tips that you can use in making contact info research faster and more efficient. At least some of the steps that I mentioned here wee already tested – and worked. Of course, there are a lot of alternatives to the approach that I outlined here. And also, there are some things that may never work for you. The most important thing to remember is to always test the waters and see what works well (and best).
