Search Engine Marketing Blog

OK, calm down. You have to admit - I got your attention.

Seriously now, the most effective method I have found for obtaining free, non-reciprocal links is to tell the site owner that something is wrong with his/her site. I don’t really mean to say that you should pick the site apart. You should very helpfully and politely let them know that there is a broken link, missing graphic, spelling mistake or some other error on such and such a page.

As long as it’s helpful and written in a polite and friendly, chatty manner you’ll convince the site owner you have been to the site - score one for you - and that you are interested in helping them make it an even better site than it already is - now you’re in their good books.

Once that you have their attention and they are in a grateful mood you might as well mention, just as an aside, that you happen to have a site on a similar topic that might of interest to their site’s viewers. If they want to have a look it’s at www.pleaselinktome.com. Keep up the good work and all that.

Now, it can take time to find a mistake on a site and site owners know this. Thus they will believe you are a real person, not just some scummy link bot and that you were actually on their site rather than sending out random emails from a link building “battery farm” on the Indian sub-continent.

Your link request is all about them and their site. Not yours. Everybody loves hearing about themselves and people are usually genuinely grateful you took the time to help them out and so be more willing to take the time to look at your site.

Give it a shot - it’s always worked for me. It’s also worked on me. I don’t often give links from my main site to people who request them - I prefer to link to sites I find - but when I got an email informing me of a broken link on one of the pages of SEM Guide and then asking if I could take a look at their “relevant” site with a view to maybe including it in my list of resources I did.

So there you go, apparently someone else already knows about this little secret - of course it was a link building firm so they should know.

TOP performing types of links in terms of traffic

FREE LINKS

BEST old links from old, established sites that were given to a site a long time ago. I tend to try to buy sites that have this sort of vintage link credibility cause other than waiting around for 5 years buying the site is the only way to get “aged” links.

BEST deep links from dmoz ie www.dmoz.org/Recreation/Humor/Jokes/Joke_of_the_Day/ but deep links are unlikely except for very old sites (were the only ones for the category when dmoz was sent up) or sites with interesting niche pages that can be used to fill empty niche dmoz categories. So find out what those niches are, do good pages and then hope the dmoz editors finds them. I would NOT advise submitting deep links or you risk getting them all removed.

BEST deep links from a very specific page of a very specific site that links to my site as an endorsement or as the only choice for a specific type of information.

VERY GOOD government links that are specific to a topic (not general)

VERY GOOD educational links that are specific to a topic and where my site is included as a reference, not just one of hundreds of links

VERY GOOD highly targeted links from high traffic sites in my own network

GOOD links from articles I wrote for placement on other sites. Note: some of these do not drive a lot of traffic but it is enough, coupled with the wealth of themed text surrounding the link and PR of the site it’s placed on, to be worth the effort.

GOOD ***some*** niche directories send decent amount of traffic

OK to GOOD ***some**** links page reciprocal links. One of my site receives a few clicks per month from a variety of tiny sites’ links pages. On closer inspection I find that despite the low PR (1-4) all of the referring sites are well designed (not fancy, but tidy) with a truly useful links page that is actually linking to on-topic sites that would be of interest to the viewer and the links pages are nicely laid out. Further, the clickers are not seo specialists looking for places to get links from, they are people looking for the type of information my site contains.

OK ***some*** general directories produce quite a large amount of traffic depending on the category my site is in and how many other sites are also in there.

OK ***some*** general directories produce a small amount of traffic, enough to make them worth submitting to i.e.: www.isedb.com

Also see this post on Finding the Perfect Link by Shell Harris.

PAID LINKS

(Note that for paid links there is also the issue of price and placement terms that decide how good a deal it is)

VERY GOOD extremely targeted pages where the link has a great placement and perfectly matches the page viewer’s requirements thus generating genuinely interested clicks. The key here is the match between what the viewer wants and what my “ad” says. The same could be achieved with a link within content on a review or news post or tips article provided the link was of sufficient interest to the viewer to generate a genuinely interested click. In other words, we have to ask “who visits this page and why” and then ask “will the placement and text of my link cause enough genuine interest to generate a click”.

VERY GOOD Themed sites with decent raffic that include my link as the only or one of a very few sponsored links but the placement is such that it looks like an endorsement.

GOOD high pr, high traffic sites that display the link in a good position generate a lot of clicks simply because of the high levels of traffic generated by the site, but these are not necessarily genuinely interested clicks due to the lack of themeing between the host site and my link.

GOOD low traffic, very targeted sites that link to my site from within content.

OK to GOOD low traffic, very targeted sites that include my link in a non prominent position on a normal page, not on a links page.

OK to GOOD pages that I have bought and created content for on someone else’s site - sometimes called “presell” pages. Obviously the return on investment will depend on how well that page shows up in search results.

OK to GOOD Yahoo ***can*** produce a decent amount of traffic. You pretty much have to have the Yahoo directory link anyway for relevance (Google does pay attention to it) but sometimes it also sends clicks.