The Wrong Approach To Take On Your Link Building Campaign

With search engine marketing campaigns today, a key factor in your rankings is the amount of links you have pointing back to your website. That is why link building is so important when marketing your website. I am sure you have read it time and time again, “backlinks are key to improving your rankings”, “get more backlinks and your SERP’s will increase”, “more backlinks will mean more traffic”. Getting those links however takes time and will not happen overnight, unless of course you just buy a bunch of links and purchase featured listings with high PR directories. That is another post; let me tell you what not to do in your attempts to getting those links.

Email is a big part for most everyone these days, I respond to more emails then I do phone calls. So naturally people will try and use the power of email to help build up there links because it is so easy do to. Here is an example of an email I received that demonstrates what not to do with your link building campaign. Please note that the person’s name, website and business name have been removed.

Dear Website Owner,

My name is John Doe, I am SEO specialist for XXX company and we are assisting our new client with there website link exchange and popularity. I came across your website, www.semspot.com and am wanted to speak to you about advertising and link exchanging. As you know Google and several other search engines take your link popularity into account when determining your rankings on the search engines. In an effort to help both you and our client, we would like to offer a link exchange between the two sites. Please take the time and add the following link to your home page:

http://www.siteremoved.com>Anchor Removed

In return we will place your link on the following page

http://www.siteremoved.com/links1.html

Thank you for taking the time to exchange links with our client.

Now lets look at the flaws in this email and what I suggest that you never do.

1. Ok first problem is never spam site owners. Get to know them a little first before asking straight up for any type of link. You are more prone to link to someone you know or feel comfortable with rather then a complete stranger.
2. Always try and address them by at least there first name, first and last looks more professional though.
3. Link exchanges are a think of the past, yes in years past they had great value, but those days are history. You want to focus more on one way links then setting up a bunch of link exchanges.
4. Never tell them where to place your link, in this case I was told to add it to my home page. They wanted there link to go on my home page, but they were going to bury my link on there links1.html page which probably means links2.html, links3.html, links4.html are soon to follow. The more link pages you see, the more that looks like a link farm to the search engines.
5. When asking for a link, make sure the website you are trying to get a link on has something to do with your website. If you are selling cell phone accessories, do not try and get links on a fishing website. It is important that links you are trying to build has something to do with your product.

Keep this information in mind when trying to use email to gain more links to your website. Yes it is very easy to email a thousand websites asking, it is also just as easy for the person hit the delete button.