Everybody who owns a website gets them, and usually several a week: link requests. Especially when your site jumps to a PageRank of 5 or higher, all kinds of webmasters suddenly seem to feel that their website is related to yours. And since they are, why not swap links, right?

Over the years, I must have received thousands of link requests emails, but I have sent out quite a few myself as well. This has learned me to understand the language of link requests, because some are actually written in a secret language with lots of hidden messages. I have translated an email for everybody who doesn’t speak this language, so you can see what *most* link builders actually mean.

This is a real life (slightly modified) example:

Hi Webmaster,

I have a web site, http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com and have spent a lot of time and effort to ensure my visitors gain the maximum benefit from their visit, and from what I have to offer. As our web sites are closely related and our products do not compete, I feel the exchanging of links would be a mutually beneficial arrangement. If you are interested for Link Exchange so please feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience. I will also add your site within 6 hours of your positive reply.

Here is my linking details :-

Title: Buy cheap blue widgets online
URL: http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com
Description: Cheap blue widgets, high quality red widgets, exclusive ivory widgets and fluffy pink widgets. Free worldwide shipping on orders over $250.

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:

<p><a href="http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com"> Buy cheap blue widgets online</a> Cheap blue widgets, high quality red widgets, exclusive ivory widgets and fluffy pink widgets. Free worldwide shipping on orders over $250.</p>

I will add your link at here :
http://www.website1.com/web-development-resources.html (pr1)
http://www.website2.org/website-development-services-india.html (pr3!)

http://www.web-site-4.com/Resources.html

http://subdomain.website3.com/Computers_Communications_And_Electronics/Internet/

Your link will be added on my site within 6 hours. So if you are interested for link exchange with my site please let me know and we can do a better work for our sites.

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you.
Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead :)

Bests Regards
webmaster.anna@gmail.com

But this is what ‘webmaster Anna’ actually means:

Hi there,

I was too lazy to find out what your name actually is, but webmaster is probably fine, right?

I have a web site, http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com and have spent a lot of time trying to find short cuts to make money with it. I am quite lazy and want to make loads of cash while I stay in my bed as long as possible. I believe that a link on your website to mine will improve my search engine rankings, so I feel the exchanging of links would be a good arrangement for me in particular. I love starting sentences with ‘I’ (after all, it is all about me), and my grammar is pretty bad. I pretend to add your site within 6 hours of your positive reply, so please drop all your other work and reply to me asap. Capice?

Here are my linking details :

Title: Buy cheap blue widgets online (Yes, this is my company name. Pinky swear.)
URL: http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com
Description: A bunch of keywords here. Additional sentence to camouflage all the keywords.

And since I really want you to use the exact keywords I provided as the anchor text, here is the info in html:

<p><a href="http://www.a-website-with-lots-of-hyphens.com"> Buy cheap blue widgets online</a> Buy cheap blue widgets online A bunch of keywords here. Additional sentence to camouflage all the keywords.</p>

I will add your link at here :
http://www.very-crappy-website.com/irrelevant-resources.html (PR1)
http://www.3-way-linking-site.org/link-page-391.php (PR3 – w00t!)

http://www.trapezoidal-linking-matriflux.com/Resources.html

http://even.more-crap.com/Free_Links_For_All/ (notice how I have stopped mentioning PR?)

Your link will be added on my site within 6 hours. My script will take care of it, and it will also take care of deleting two of your four links in about a week. The other two links will be on penalized pages with a noindex, nofollow meta tag. So if you are interested in exchanging links, please let me know and I will screw you over.

Please forward me your linking details, along with confirmation where my link has been added by you. I need to show this to my boss to collect my bonus.
Hoping for an early and positive response from your side. I’ll sign you up for 23 newsletters you won’t be able to unsubscribe from if you ignore all three of my messages.

Have a nice day ahead. With an average conversion rate of nearly .02%, I’m sure I will :)

Best regards,

webmaster.anna@gmail.com
(My name is actually Roger, but I think you’re more likely to accept my offer when I call myself Anna. Yes, I will literally do anything for links.)

Yes, the language of some link requests can be quite deceiving. Make sure you write yours in plain English.

Every two years, SEOmoz ask dozens of search marketing professionals to share their opinions on several (possible) search engine ranking influencing factors, and they’ve just released this years edition. It’s funny to see that, although I hear and read about ‘links getting devalued as a search engine ranking influencing metric’ more often, 80% of the top 5 factors (according to the 72 contributors) are still link related.

The top 5 ranking factors:

1. Keyword focused anchor text from external links (73%)
2. External link popularity (quantity/quality of external links) (71%)
3. Diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains) (67%)
4. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag (66%)
5. Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains (e.g. TrustRank, domain mozTrust, etc.) (66%)

Additionally, Google (unintentionally) underlined the outcome of SEOmoz’ research, and the importance of links. About two weeks ago, they decided to give the world a preview of what it calls its “next-generation infrastructure”, with the code name Caffeine. Within two weeks, this page is ranking at #3 for ‘caffeine’, without even mentioning it anywhere on the page. Although Google tried to make sure that the effectiveness of link bombing would decrease, this again shows the importance of external anchor text and page content of linking pages. Even in Caffeine.

[Edit 27/08: I just noticed that DaveN covered this as well. Great minds... :) ]

Yes, I know that I have already explained where you can start your link building campaign, but, actually, a link building campaign begins even before you start analyzing the current situation, and far before you start building new links. It starts with asking the right questions.

In this post, I’ll mention a few questions that you could ask your new link building client, but, in the case that you’re not working for a client, you could be asking them to your boss or maybe even to yourself as well.

Some of these questions should also be asked earlier in the sales process, for example before or during a sales pitch, but not every link marketer is in the situation that he or she is involved in this sales process from start till end.

What do you know about link marketing? What does your boss know about link marketing?

Starting with this question will make it a lot easier for you to keep your client happy. If he doesn’t know a lot about SEO and/ or link marketing yet, you can try to increase his level of knowledge, while you work for him. For example, when you’re working for someone who’s new to link building, reporting that ‘you’ve managed to get 2 highly relevant, editorial .edu links in just a few hours of work’, might not be such a good idea. Try to explain the value of links first, and/ or start your reporting with results that he can fully understand.

Also, when your contact person has to report to his superior, it’s also useful to get an idea of what the knowledge level of that manager is. That way, you can provide the right information to your contact person, to keep his boss happy as well. Using an approach like this usually results in a very happy contact person (you’re ‘helping him out’ as well), who’s willing to fight for you during meetings with his boss.

Did you hire an SEO or link building company in the past, or have you built links yourself?

Asking a question like this might give you an indication of what kind of strategies have been used in the past. For example, if your new client hired an SEO agency in the past, that mainly used services like TLA, ReviewMe and PPP to get new links, you know that you have to clean up first, before you can start building new links.

While tools like MajesticSEO also have the ability to show you what links were placed to a specific web page in the past, simply asking the client what strategies were used previously can give you just as much information.

Can you tell more about your company, i.e. the company philosophy, office locations, etc.?

Link building opportunities are everywhere. Office locations are a good start for localized link building, a list of important employees might help you to discover (linkless) press mentions, and the company philosophy may provide different link building angles as well.

Ask your client to provide as much information about the company and the people that work there as possible, including (old) brochures and other documentation. Filter out whatever you feel is necessary or useful, and write that down for future use.

What are the USPs of your product(s) or service(s)?

Just like with the company, you also need to know what is unique about the products your client is trying to sell. Unique angles lead to links. Are their products environmentally friendly? Aim at eco blogs & websites. Is your client the cheapest in the industry? Try to obtain links from price comparison websites, or focus on websites that offer money saving tips, just to name a few.

If your client is not able to tell you their USP, you’ll probably have a hard time promoting the website. No USP usually means mediocrity, and mediocrity means low link building conversion rates, because the website does not add a lot of extra value. Adding exceptional content to your client’s website will probably be your only option.

Can you name 5 of your biggest competitors? Can you explain why these companies are big competitors?

Asking this question can give you more insights in the knowledge level of your contact person (“yes, there is a difference between online and offline competition”), but can also be the jump start of your competitor analysis.

Also, adding ‘why are this your most important competitors’, may reveal some details about these competitors and their USPs as well. Some companies seem to know their competitors better than they know their own company, so asking this question might be very useful.

Do you have a LinkedIn profile, and -if so- can you accept me as a connection?

LinkedIn profiles, and some other social network profiles as well, are excellent to discover interesting connections that your new client may have.

First, you can try to see which journalists, bloggers, reporters or other interesting webmasters are directly connected to your contact person. Advise your client on how to use this network optimally, by giving him clear directions. Don’t just say “try to get links from these places”, but use him as one of your own link developers.

You can also try to find interesting connections the other way around. Determine which people are highly influential in your client’s industry, and find out if your client is connected to these influencers, or which of your client’s connections are.

Are you currently sponsoring any events, charities or whatsoever?

Asking this question (and getting ‘yes’ as an answer) can lead you to some low hanging fruit. High quality, very low hanging fruit. Lots of charities and events list their sponsors on their website, but not a lot do this in an optimal way. Some only mention contributing companies, others link using third party scripts and some use heavily unoptimized image links. Spending some time optimizing these relationships (in a non-spammy way, of course) is usually well worth it.

What kind of private data do you have?

I’m not talking about personal private data here, but lots of companies have a huge amount of market research information, general client data, or other facts and numbers that are perfectly suitable for creating linkbait-type of content. Try to find out what kind of data your client has. Most companies don’t even realize the value of the information they have, or what they could do with it.

Now comes the difficult part: when you have discovered some data, studies, or other information that you could use to attract more links, it’s time to convince the client why making his precious, valuable information accessible to the public (including competitors) is a good thing. Some clients will understand this straight away, but you might have a hard time convincing others.

Do you have any interns or students working at your company?

Interns and students not only can be an access point to a .edu domain, but can be used to create awesome, linkable content during their internship as well. Mix both, and you have the ability to publish links to awesome content on a .edu domain :)

What are your offline marketing plans for the next season?

Integrating online and offline marketing efforts can be highly effective. Instead of 1+1=2, it could even be 1+1=3, depending on the campaign and execution. However, even in 2009, not a lot of companies seem to realize this.

If your client is planning on launching a creative offline advertising campaign, you’d want to know, because failing to create a related linkbait campaign (or optimizing the online part of the campaign) would be a missed opportunity.

Of course, there are tons of other questions that you could ask a new (or existing) client. Do you have any other questions to add to this list, that you could ask a client?

Over time, people must have asked me over a hundred times what kind of link request email template I use when I contact other websites owners to get a link, or what kind of email format I consider to be the “perfect” link request format.

In my opinion, the perfect link request email template looks something like this;

{Greeting} {Name},

{Opening/ Introduction}

{Explanation of why your website is relevant to the one you’re contacting}

{Include WIIFM for the person you’re emailing}

{Close},

{Your Name}

I bet you were hoping for a bit more :) . You were hoping for something that you could copy/ paste and save time with. Well, sorry, but it usually doesn’t work like that :)

The problem with sending out emails is that your contacting individuals. And every individual is different, and therefore requires a different approach. Sure, there are things that you can either automate or templatize, but this is pretty difficult with link requests in general. In most cases, using email templates will result in a significantly lower success or link conversion rate.

When you think about all different factors that come into play, you’ll probably agree with me:

• What industry are you in? Whether it’s tech, banking or automotive; every industry needs a different approach in email format, use of language and level of explanation.
• What kind of media are you approaching? Traditional media usually need (or are used to) a different approach than bloggers or other webmasters.
• What is the profession of the person you’re emailing? Is it a professor, a hobbyist or a school boy?
• Are you contacting a man or a woman? This isn’t just for the opening (Dear Mr. X/ Hello Mrs. Y), but you can use it for so many other things as well. Leveling, for instance.
• What’s the age of the person you’re trying to reach? A eighteen year old will probably communicate on a different level than an eighty year old.
• Does your contact person have any hobbies? Hobbies are excellent for personalization; you show that you’ve been following the person you’re contacting (don’t overdo this in a creepy way, though)
• What is your proposition? Are you just requesting a link, trying to establish a relationship, or are you aiming at a guest post?
• Are there other relevant factors you could use? Have you read other articles written by the person you’re trying to reach? Do you have a history with the guy you’re contacting, or are you contacting him out of the blue? What’s the relevance level between your website and the website you want to obtain a link from? Etcetera, etcetera.

If you’re constantly working in the same industry, contacting the same type of men (or women) of the same age, with the same hobbies, then, perhaps, you might be able to create a format that you could use yourself. However, I doubt that that’s your situation.

You could try to counter these statements by saying that sending out a link request is similar to email marketing (I’ve heard this argument in more than one occasion), but this simply isn’t true. When you’re using email marketing as a method of communicating with your customers, you (1) already have a relationship with the people you’re contacting, and (2) people don’t expect your email to be a personal email. Or do you expect that Zappos is crafting each and every email newsletter individually on a personal level? When it comes to a link request (or any other business proposal), people DO expect that the email comes from a real person, not a bot or tool.

Saving time in other ways

In stead of trying to save time by using templates that lower your success rate significantly, there are several other ways you can save time during a link marketing campaign.

> Contact relevant websites only

Lots of people are wasting time by contacting not (or slightly) related websites, in an attempt to obtain a link. Irrelevant websites will be much less likely to link to you, in comparison with relevant or highly relevant ones. So if you want to save time in an efficient way, filter out every website that’s not relevant enough. The same goes for low quality websites, by the way.

> Test your email skills

Although, like I mentioned before, no two websites or webmasters are the same, it still is possible to test your skills. For example, you could try to contact someone you know with a link request without disclosing that the email is yours. Afterwards, you can ask him what he or she thought of the email (or why it got deleted :) ). If the person finds out the email was sent by you, he/ she’ll probably honestly say what he or she thinks of your message. Repeat this a few times and learn from the opinions of your friends.

> Outsource your link marketing

Seriously, if you don’t want to do link building, you’re probably better off not doing so. If seen a lot of link requests in my life, and you can often see if it was sent by someone who’d rather be on the beach, or some place else.

In stead of focusing on link marketing, you could work on your on-site optimization, your content marketing, client acquisition or anything else you like to do. Hire someone to do the link building part for you, or to help you with the process.

You can compare sending out a link request to trying to close a sales deal; it all comes down to liking. And if the person you’re contacting doesn’t like your email, you probably won’t close the deal.

More about link requests at Clickz.com, SoloSEO and SEJ.com.

Recently, I had a discussion with a (not-so web savvy) friend who felt that link marketing services were pretty expensive. While I do believe that Tribal Internet Marketing’s rates aren’t exactly cheap (we’re certainly are not expensive either, though), it did made me think: when are link marketing services cheap and when are they expensive? To make my question a little bit more clear, I’ve listed some of the most common types of link building related ‘products’ below. Some of these products may seem really inexpensive at first, but remember that cheap usually is expensive in the long run.

Automated link building software

It may not come as a surprise that I’m not a fan of automated link building software. There are tons of reasons why I believe you should never choose for any link building software, but there are two big reasons why lots of people still do so: it’s easy and cheap.

The low quality of the links that most automated link building programs bring you is the least of your worries. Because most other webmasters that use tools like this usually control websites of reasonably low quality, the use of automated link building software might put your website in a bad neighborhood. That would mean that, in stead of reaping the benefits of your nifty little tool, this might result in you having to clean up your automatically generated link profile all summer long. Manually.

Directory submission package

In stead of building links the automated way, you can also build links the nearly-automated way. On forums like Digitalpoint, lots of users offer their manual directory submission services. While most of these aren’t exactly manual, some actually provide a package of around 800 manual submissions of your website to general directories. The costs vary from around $100 to about double. Most of the lower prices are in fact automated tools (see above) that do the work. Do you really think that Indian guy who offered to submit your website to 13,000 (!) directories for $13,50 does this manually?

Directory submission packages are near useless in 99% of the situations. The majority of the directories that your website gets submitted to hold no to very little value and you’ve probably already submitted your site to the handful of directories that do carry any value. In some cases -for example when you submit your brand new website to 13,000 ‘high-quality’ directories ‘manually’-, it could even cause serious problems. Let me re-phrase that for you: if you want to prevent your brand new competitor to perform well for a very short while, make sure that his site gets submitted to a large amount of questionable directories.

Do-follow hunting

Apparently, do-follow hunting is the next big thing. I came across quite a few blog posts recently, that discussed how going after nearly any link that is not being nofollowed will help you to gain better rankings in search engines. It’s easy (there are lots of do-follow search engines), it results in extra links and -best of all- it’s totally free!

Well, the only thing free is the waste of time, because the do-follow links that the most are after don’t contribute a lot to your search engine rankings. Most social media profile links don’t pass any value either, will get nofollowed later on, or will simply never get found by search engines. Blog comments (whether they’re dofollow or nofollow) do not pass the same amount of juice as blog post links and most other FFA links hold little to no value as well.

Also, hunting for do-follow links also isn’t exactly free. I’m pretty sure that, in stead of going after those secret, high value links (or hiring someone to do it), you could’ve done something way more productive.

Link brokerage deal

Link brokers are the link building equivalent of Google AdWords. Once you stop paying, the results may drop almost instantly. In some occasions, however, buying links may still work exceptionally well, which is why link brokers (and paid links in general) still exist.

Renting links has two really big advantages. The first one is that, once you stop paying, everything disappears. The links, the rankings, everything. If the ROI happens to be positive, it’s really not a big deal. Keep those paid links until Google finds them and then stop paying. This brings me to the second disadvantage as well: the risk. If Google (or more probably: a competitor) comes across your obviously paid link profile, it can all be over very quickly. And not just the links and rankings, but your brand as well. And it will take a whole lot of time and money to rebuild that.

Pay per link

Where link brokers usually just rent links, other companies charge money for their services based on the amount of links that they’ll obtain for you. Some do this on a flat rate (for example $25/link), others try to differentiate the rates by charging for PageRank (for example $20 for a PR2 link and $50 for a PR4 link).

There are lots of reasons I can think of why such a pricing method is wrong, but Eric Enge already wrote a great post about this earlier.

Link marketing workshop/ consultancy

A trend that started a while ago -and that will probably go on for at least a few more years- is a growing demand for good SEO related workshops and trainings. While the price (usually low to mid-range $XXXX for half a day, or a several hundred bucks an hour for one-on-one consulting) scares off lots of folks, because it looks pretty expensive for just a few hours of training, from my experience, private workshops tend to have an exceptionally high ROI.

A couple of hours listening to, or brainstorming with, an expert can lead to a lot of extra knowledge, tips, ideas and solid advice. Also, in stead of having to find everything out yourself by trial and error, the expert’s experience can save you time, by helping to filter out all strategies and tactics that might work in your specific situation.

Conclusion

I am not judging any of the link building services listed above, as they might definitely work in certain situations. However, you’ll have to keep in mind that there’s a difference between cheap and inexpensive. Something can only be inexpensive if the ROI is positive, the price alone is not enough to determine this.

Starting up a link marketing campaign is easy. Thorough preparation before starting up a link marketing campaign is often neglected, however.  By thinking everything well through in a structured way, you dramatically improve the chances of your link marketing campaign being successful.

Make a snapshot of the start

You’ll never know what you’ve achieved if you don’t know where you came from. Capturing your starting situation is very important for an evaluation of how successful (or not) specific strategies or actions have been in a later stage.

Think about your goals

Try to think as ambitiously as you can. Don’t limit yourself to anything just yet, but try to picture where you want to be in an X amount of time. I usually refer to these goals as the ‘wish-goals’. The real goals will be determined later on, but it’s important to think about this early as well. It not only gets you thinking about what you want, but will make sure that the research you’ll perform is more targeted.

Investigate the competition

Look at the keywords you want to rank for and determine who your online competitors are. Don’t limit this to organic competition only, but look at the paid results as well. Check out what the overall quality of the competing sites is, what the most important features of these sites are, what kind of content they carry, where they’re listed, and so on.

Evaluate what you have

Now that you know where you’re at right now, where you want to be in the future, and who you’ll have to compete with, you can start evaluating what you have. Is your current situation enough to reach your goals?

If not, try to determine what you’ll have to adjust. Your internal link structure, the amount (and quality) of your content and your website’s design are easier to adjust than your external links. After all, you’re in control.

Of course, it could also turn out that the goals you’ve set can’t be reached with what you have right now and a few additions or adjustments. In that case, adjust your goals to something more acceptable and try to aim for those higher goals at a later stage.

If it turns out that you can easily reach your goals with what you have right now, adjust your goals and start being a little bit ambitious, dammit! You won’t get anywhere if you don’t push yourself.

Determine your goals & strategy

Now it’s time to rethink the goals you’ve thought about earlier, but keep them SMART. You know what you want to reach, you know which companies you’ll have to compete with and you know what you’re current situation is like. Try to calculate where these three lines meet, put the bar just a little higher and there: you’ve determined your goals.

Because you’ve done your homework, it’s also a lot easier to create the perfect strategy for your campaign. Whether it’s building links to specific pages, creating link targeted content or any other strategy; write it down before you start. This makes sure that you don’t forget certain tactics and that the overall campaign will be a well-structured one.

Find the influencers

Although there are tons of link building strategies that you can use during a campaign, there is a specific group of influencers for any campaign that you just have to target. These influencers not only reach your target audience spot on, but may be able to boost your website to top rankings with just a few links. Connect with them, but don’t harass them with link requests or whatsoever. People are much more willing to link to you if they’ve known you for a (short) while. Networking is a process, not an action.

Plan moments of evaluation

This is a very important step in the process of starting up a link marketing campaign. Compare your achievements with your snapshot of the start and the goals you’ve set regularly. Plan these moments in advance, in order to being able to adjust your strategy in time, if things don’t seem to work out like you’ve planned.

Start your campaign

Finally, it’s time to start the campaign. First, there are several link marketing tactics that you can use that don’t envolve hunting, cold calling, or any other mind numbing activities. After picking the low hanging fruit, you can move on to the next part of your strategy. Contact the influencers you’ve been chatting with for the past few weeks or months, leverage your existing network, go after those .edu’s, or whatever you have to do to reach your goals.

Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy during a campaign, by the way. Things change, and so do your competitors, your online environment, search engines and their algorithms. Follow your results, link building news and your overall campaign very closely, and you’ll probably be safe.