As more businesses become aware of the value of links from an SEO perspective they are less likely to link to your site for free. Now they typically ask for reciprocal links, but as we know there’s little value for either party in reciprocal linking – Google knows it’s a whole ‘you scratch my back link and I’ll scratch yours’ affair. So how do we go about link building these days?
The Lowly Link Request.
I think this is a fairly outdated method however there’s a lot to be said for the classics and if performed correctly, it can still be a successful strategy for link building. After finding some sites that you think are suitable take the time to research them thoroughly. Do they seem like the site to link out? Is their content relevant to the client you want them to link to? And finally what is the tone of the site? – Use this to dictate your link request email.
When composing the link request email keep it short and sweet. Explain who you are, where you’re working from and why you’re contacting them. Speak in plain English using as little jargon as possible. When researching the prospective site, try to find a name or personal email address as this is almost invaluable when sending the request. The target is a lot more likely to take heed of the email if it is addressed directly to them.
Quality Content Exchange.
This technique offers quality content in exchange for a link to you or your client’s website. The quality content could be in the form of a guest post on a popular and relevant blog, or a whitepaper on some appropriate subject matter or even a handy widget to place on their site. Site owners are always interested in quality content that adds value to their online presence and are normally happy to link back to the creators of that content.
This tactic is great to build up relationships with other communities online, which is essential to link building so nurture these connections, open up a conversation, share content and information, and the links will follow.
Article Submission.
This is another classic tactic that is tried and tested throughout the industry. Article submissions are an excellent way to get a lot of links fairly quickly. Spend a day searching for article sites and compile a long list (aim for anything between 100 – 200) then as you work through these sites, submitting articles, separate the wheat from the chaff. You can tell quite quickly which sites are good and which are worthless. Go back and see how many sites have published your article and how many are still reviewing it. What you’ll soon find is that some let your content sit there uselessly for weeks while others review and publish your article after a day or two. You can typically get three links with each article, either within the body content or in the ‘about the author’ box. So this is plenty to link to the client’s landing pages or even pages more in depth.
