Alaska’s Best SEO

Link building is the cornerstone of a good organic SEO campaign. Having good quality links (links that have good descriptive keywords in the link) should be your number one goal in getting ranking, right behind good content.

So how do you build links? Easy. You find sites that relate to yours (industry related, bloggers, customers, friends, and so forth) and ask them to link back to your site.

How man of these have you seen (if not…you should definitely consider working your SEO) the following e-mails? The example has had all the senders information removed:

Dear Webmaster,I need PR 2+ links for my site.

My Linking Details;

URL: [THEIR DOMAIN]
Title: Burglar Alarms
Description: Burglar alarms for do it yourselfers. Top brands and best prices for burglar alarms!

Linkback Site: [TOTALLY DIFFERENT DOMAIN] PR 3

And Let me know when our link is live. At this time I am accepting links from all themes. (except adult, casino, gambling)

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Thanks and Regards,
[THEIR DOMAIN]

Contacting a webmaster is easy, however you don’t want to convey a bad mesaage or worse look like a spammer, possibly loosing not only the link…but also having some blogger write a post about how you dared to spam them (many bloggers can be pretty mean on their blogs!).

So here are some simple tricks to getting a site to link to you:

• Keep your e-mail to 25 words or less. You don’t need to “butter up” the person you’re trying to contact.
• Provide your real contact information (name, e-mail, title, organization).
• Have your contact e-mail address show from the domain you’re asking the link from (as in don’t use email@hotmail.com as the return for yourgreatsite.com).
• Personalize the e-mail. People respond to an honest reason to link than “Hi, I found your site and think you should link to us….”
• Reciprocal link. This is critical! Don’t e-mail with the following “Once you link to us, we’ll link to you” or as above not even saying you linked or are willing to link back to them!
• SPELL & GRAMMAR CHECK! Seriously…if you received an e-mail that was fought with misspellings and grammatical errors, you have to also wonder how the site looks as well.

I have read many books, posts, and heard podcasts that recommend using a form letter (with some sites/forums offering “templates”). We don’t recommend that if at all possible as many of the more “savvy” webmasters out there will instantly identity it as such (especially if their site is a regular recipient of requests) and probably ignore them - or worse yet, a “black hat” (questionable) SEO group uses the same template and you’re filtered out for being similar.

Just use the golden rule in asking for a link or updating a link…treat them the way you want to be treated.

An sincere e-mail asking to link because in reviewing their site you saw that they are a related interest (cite specifics of the site - that goes a LONG way in showing you really looked at the site) and you’ve already linked to them will go a lot farther than the above example.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under SEO Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.