Common Client Question: How do I get other websites to link to me? I don’t want to annoy anyone, and I want to make sure I’m not wasting my valuable time.
The art of the link deal is a delicate one, it requires a lot of tact and just the right amount of aggressiveness. To make sure you’re not wasting your time, carefully analyze the site and check very carefully to see whether your site and the site in question are a good match. How do you find out whether or not a site is a good match?
First, the site should be topically relevant and be closely related, even if only semantically. What does that mean? Simply put, if your site is about Women’s Shoes, do not exchange links or request links from a site that offers stock market tips and resources. And also don’t link to an electronics website. Similar, or rather compatible sites to/with Women’s Shoes would possibly be: Women’s Health, Pregnancy, Childbirth, Clothing, etc. Use Google’s “similar pages” feature to find related sites within your industry. Starting to get the picture?
Once you have found a compatible site, check whether they have a resources page that ONLY contains related, high-quality links. If they have an automated link directory, then this is where they will probably place your link, which is of little value since most search engines are aware of link pages and they will not pass “juice” if detected. If they do not have a link directory, then you need to check where is the best place on their site for them to put your link. Create an email custom tailored to their site for best results, and replace a broken link to an outdated resource if possible.
Next you need to email them. Tell the site owner that you noticed a broken link on their site and that search engines frown upon this (show them the page where you noticed the broken link, and make sure it is a quality page), or ask how much advertising space would cost. It’s recommended and a good practice to supply your own linking code. This way, you can add your keywords to your description, vary anchor text within the link code, and control the image of your website to outside visitors.
Practice definitely makes perfect when it comes to requesting links, but the key is to do it manually and never give the appearance of using software to automate link building. This will increase response rates and let site owners know that you’re taking the time out to actually review their site.
Common Client Question: We have low responses to the link request emails that send to our potential link targets. How can we improve our response and conversion rates?
With spam at an all time high, new email viruses spreading daily, and overloaded inboxes all over the world, it’s hard to capture a recipient’s attention. You have less than 1 millisecond.
These days, it has become more and more difficult to market to your potential link targets via email, that is if you haven’t done your homework. If you put yourself in the right frame of mind there are plenty of opportunities to increase your response rates and build a steady stream of high-quality backlinks to your website through email.
The link request email that you send must be incredibly valuable to your prospect since the recipient did not express an interest in your website or being contacted. Just think to yourself, would I want to read this message? If the answer is no, you need to stop immediately and rethink how you will execute your webmaster outreach campaign. After making the necessary changes and coming up with new creative ideas, review all of the details over and over again, until you can say that you would read it.
How many emails do you read that have the appearance of being spam? Probably none. This is why it’s important to let link targets know that you actually reviewed their site and have a legitimate reason to send an email. You may also want to customize the email with the recipient’s first and/or last name, although this has become commonplace among email spammers as well.
Broken link notification emails are always sure to get a great response, but just be sure you’re not taking the wrong tone with the webmaster and reinforce the fact that your offer is mutually beneficial.
As long as you always try to put yourself in the shoes of your potential link targets, you won’t go wrong. Make immediate improvements in your link request campaign’s response rates and effectiveness by really thinking about what it is that makes you respond to emails that you receive, then build upon that.
