Link Building For Dummies

Sometimes, I’m a dummy when it comes to link building. I have done some really stupid things and they have always revealed their own inefficiencies to me in some unpleasant manner or another. So to spare you some of those “special” moments, here’s my personal list of good practices to get you started.

Understanding Your Website’s Value

Every single page on your site has it’s own angle and approach for delivering it’s message and ultimately the whole site gets a unique face from that. Even the most boring of websites are still unique (unless they scrape their content from somewhere else), therefore presenting it’s own value to this big jumbled mess we know as the Internet.

To make your value established and noticeable, present your information intelligently, and always link to original references. People link to accurate and clearly written information.. ya know.. it ’s that whole authority thing. It’s not impossible to come across as knowledgable and interesting at the same time, so put your own personality into it. Unless you’re a total jerk. No one likes jerks.

Invite Readers To Chime In

Nothing tackier than a link titled “Links” sitting anywhere on your site, but you want to show the public you’re accessible to setting up inbound links in some manner. So how can you do it so you don’t sound desperate like the ugly kid on prom night?

Take the Wikipedia approach: invite people to chime in on the subject by asking them to add more to the information via a contact form. Let the public know that you will allow a link back to them as the original contributor, but they must put a link of your choice to your site on their site. Sounds complicated right? Well it’s not really that bad since you can always rely on people wanting to toot their own online horn whenever they can. Why do you think people love commenting on blogs so much?

Quality Check

For me, the part I hate the most is sending out emails to webmasters asking if they would like to exchange links, or perhaps add a link to my site if they have a page that pertains to something on my site. I blame supposed SEO software that try to automate the human connection, as well as annoying overseas SEO firms that aggressively hound webmasters for a marketing contract; these 2 things have tainted the most essential part of link building. Thanks guys, you totally suck.

So the way I approach this is by really spending time on their website, finding the page that I would like to have my link on and running a quick battery of tests to see if it’s a wise place to request a link. In Firefox or Flock, I use the SEOpen and Web Developer extensions to do the following;

• Use the Wayback Machine to see if the URL has a shady history
• Check the WhoIs records to find out how old the site is and how long the domain is registered for
• Find out if and when the target page was last cached by Google and Yahoo
• If they have a blog, check for ugly comment spam
• View source and check for “nofollow” tags on the outbound links
• Ctrl+F in my browser, input my desired keywords that will be in the anchor text, do a count of the instances it appears on the page
• Make sure they have a way to be contacted on the site (duh)

Those steps right there are my quality assurance steps. What about PageRank? Screw Pagerank. Pay attention to the real metrics that make up the value factors. By taking this approach, I spare myself some mishaps down the road if any of the search engines devalue the page or worse, kick the site out of their index.

Bureaucracy

Paperwork sucks sometimes, but record keeping is essential to your marketing. I use the following downloadable spreadsheet;

DOWNLOAD: Link Tracking Spreadsheet

Open it up, pretty self explanatory. This will help you keep tabs on who you’ve contacted already so you don’t act.. well.. stupid later on.

Making First Contact

Going back to my earlier rant about other people screwing up our contact with webmasters, how we approach them is like defusing a bomb. If you want the desired results, you can’t overlook anything you do in your contact email. Do it wrong, and you don’t get another chance with that webmaster and you’re still the ugly kid on prom night.

So now that you have totally inspected the page you want your link on, as well as the website as a whole, you can now use that to your advantage. This is an example of an email template I use that has a fair amount of positive results.

——————-begin letter———————–

|if possible use their name here, or use plain old webmaster|

Hi I was on your site, |website name|, and was checking out |topic of the desired page| and I really like what you wrote about. |More detail about why it interests you, or your take on it|. Over at my site, I have a page that talks about |topic of the desired page, or simliar interest| and was wondering if you could give me your feedback on what I wrote? The page I wrote is at |use the full URL|. Also, I would like to link to |desired page| from my article, so my visitors can check out your site.

Thanks for reading this and keep writing great articles!

|Your name|
|your website address|
|Instant messengers contact info|

——————-end letter———————–

DOWNLOAD: Link Request Template

You can vary this as much as you like but you get the general idea here; compliment, be authentic in your reference to their site, show that you are reading their site, get their input on what you wrote, offer to link to them, leave multiple contact options for their convenience if possible. Basically break the mold of “I already put a link to your site up, will you link back to me?” routine; it just doesn’t work as well as it used to.

Did you notice that not once are you asking for a link? Instead you are offering something on a condition; they check out your site to earn a link from you. When they contact you back, then you can ask if they’ll link to you. They would have to be pretty damn rude to turn you down after you solicited them for their “expert opinion” and gave them a link to an internal page on their site.

Conclusion

So this way requires some paperwork on your end, and it requires you to do more quality assurance work on EVERY aspect of link building. But think about it this way; if you went out and carelessly approached any of this, it would guarantee you double-work to make up for lost opportunities at some point. Either you would be pestering an already unimpressed webmaster for a link you’re never going to get, or you have to regain trust with search engines that are unimpressed with your inbound link sources.

I hope this helps, and if you have any ideas on how to improve upon what I’ve said, please let me know below. Thanks and HAPPY 4TH OF JULY everyone!

Sphinn This Twitter This Stumble This Trackback