Link Building by Alexander Graham Bell
So everyone is always looking for ways to find other methods of generating inbound links. I think we’re all tired of seeing the lame link request emails in our inbox:
“Dear Info,
Your sight is really great. We noticed it’s similer to our site and we wood like to exchange links with you. Please link to our PR 0 page from your PR 5 page. By doing this, we will help each other to get better rankings. My site will be a PR 12 on the next Google update.
Thank you,
Brad…errrrrrrrrrr…..Rajeesh”
Makes you want to link to them right away doesn’t it? So are you one of those people who are trying to send out similar emails to other people? Stop. It’s time for something different. There’s a great new invention that may help you get links much faster than emails. It’s called the telephone. It’s a device used to transmit and receive sound, usually over long distances. Find the sites you’d like a link from and make a call. What’s the absolute worst that can happen? They say no. Big deal. You’ve faced rejection pretty much every time you’ve been in a bar anyways. Pick up the phone and make a call. I think you’ll be suprised at how effective that can be. But, before you start dialing you may want to make sure that:
1. Your sites are topically related.
2. You have something of value to offer the person your calling. If it’s a link back to their site, offer to place it somewhere in the body of your content and not in a footer. Links that come from the main body of content are better. Better yet, ask them what page they would like a link from on your site.
3. The page that you’re offering a link from is cached by Google. On the rare occasion that I do read email requests for link exchanges, half the time the page people are offering to place a link on isn’t even cached by Google!
4. You “sell” them on why they should link to you. Bottom line, what’s in it for them? And come up with something better than ”Link exchanges help improve your rankings in the search engines”. That’s debatable, as Matt Cutts mentioned here that Google is getting better at finding reciprocal links and paid links. Are reciprocal links bad? Not really, but ask yourself if the link you’re planning on adding to your site is beneficial to your site visitors.
Happy cold calling.
