Link Building Letters
by DazzlinDonna
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By: Leila Davies
Link building is widely known as one of the hardest search engine marketing tasks out there. Of course, there are a few link building (dare I say it) Gods…out there like Eric Ward who just seem to have the knack. And thank the universe for them! So much to be learned in our short lives and they have many, many things to teach us grasshoppers.
Right, so link building.
There are a lot of ways you can build links actually. And it isn’t very hard to do; what is hard is getting it right. For instance, you can submit your site to directories that suit your market niche, you can join forums and take part in social media, you can send emails to sites you think are relevant to yours (you can even spy on your competitor’s links! Use this operator – link:(website) in a search engine search box and you will see what links your competitor is getting and target those sites for yourself). There are different ways to do these different practices and while they may work for some instances, they may not work in all instances. Each industry is different, sites are different – what works for one, may not work for another. Some practices you can use to build reputation, others for pure traffic. Research and practice makes the world go round, why wouldn’t this apply to link building? You will only know what works by trying, trying and trying again.
This post is going to touch on the emails you send to relevant site owners. As a treat, here is an example email you could send to the owners of sites you hope to get a link from.
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Dear Mr. Balthazar,
I thoroughly enjoyed looking through your dog grooming website, especially the ‘Bathing Bloopers’ page. I have a website on a related subject and I think it might be of interest to you and your readers. It’s “Love your dog’s teeth too” on dogaholics.com. This page contains a canine mouth care plan, including healthy teeth snack suggestions, good gum care, with a bonus section on ways to get your dogs to eat their mouth friendly food. You can find the page at http://www.dogaholics.com/toothygrins
I thought a good place on your site to link from would be on your “links” page, here: http://www.groomathon.net/links*
Here is a description that you can use if you like:
Groom your dog’s teeth too
Instructions for dog mouth care and how to keep your dog’s teeth healthy.
I hope that you find this link relevant and useful. We (and our dogs!) would certainly appreciate a link from your site. Please feel free to contact me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Charlie Brown
Online Marketing Manager, Dogaholics
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*you may be able to find a better page if you look around the site – which you should be doing.
Why this letter?
- It’s personal and specific – by using the person’s real name and giving them the linking details they need.
- It’s not coming across as a sales letter.
- A link exchange is not requested. It is entirely up to the content of your site as to whether you will receive the link or not, so it better be good!
- You get to decide what keywords you want in the anchor text.
This is by no means absolutely foolproof; you will always get people unwilling to link to you even if your site or email is written well, just to do the best you can. The success of your email attempts would also depend on the type of person receiving your email and the industry you are in – some are more open than others.
It does take a lot of time investment, but when you see that traffic coming from those referring sites…it makes your heart glad and it all seems worth it. Plus you have the opportunity to make some really good connections in the niche of your choosing.
Remember to research each site you want to email. Be sure they will find your page appropriate otherwise you are wasting your time and theirs. Find the most relevant person to contact – using a contact form is ok too. No seplling mistakes! It looks unprofessional. (See?).
Time consuming advice aside – the most important thing you need to get links is your website. If your site sells itself, people will be much more willing to link to you. Quality is king and content is queen.
Author Bio:
Leila is an online marketing specialist working for a SEO software company called Interleado. Any knowledge gained has been earned by many hours toiling on pages made of internet and paper alike and is shared whenever possible.
If you are pretending to be focusing on the value, at least
- use the right words: “resource”, “article”, “post” instead of “link”
- focus on educating the recipient on the benefits of sharing an awesome resource, not on actually “putting a link to your page from the links page” and how you follow this principle of showing the great stuff to the people
Also, though I don’t practice these letters (well, maybe once or twice, when stumbling on relevant sites), it’d probably make sense to write short letters. It saves time, makes sure that the letter is read fully and *possibly* increases the chances of the conversion.
Overall, viewing link building as a beneficial process of linking great documents together would probably be more straight-forward, than attempting to link build to get PR and other benefits.
Why I think it’ll work better, even tho I don’t do this often? Because it focuses on the core reasons for sites to exist: to provide useful stuff to the visitors, not to be “links pages” or entries in a link building report.
Superb article Leila. Out of most I’ve read, they don’t go into actually asking for a deep link as you have.
Thanks Leila for this tip on linkbuilding.
Could you tell us what is the approximate success rate in this approach?
Is such mass mail sending feature available in any SEO tools such as Web CEO or IBP?
Nice article. Yes, link building is not a simple thing even though it is rather easy to accomplish. Anyway, as far as keywords are concered i wanted to ask. many seo experts dont reply on keywords anymore. Thy prefer link building thechniques? what’s the truth?
Yes, link building is not a simple thing, and using letter you mention above I think will work. ‘Cause I got so many email link exchange and they look like a sales later or auto generate letter, when I read it I refuse them
Great post. Adding this to strategy will start to come in handy for some projects that I have lined up.
I’m glad the article helped some of you
@Web Talk I’m not sure what you mean?
@SEO Mumbai The success rate would depend largely on the people you target and how well you hone the letters you send out to each person.
The response for link exchange is much less compare to the earlier days. These days you will receive 1 or 2 response if you send 50 letters. It may vary a little more if the letter is well written but not much
The trick, if there is such a thing, is variety. Make certain you collect a steady and varied collection of links