Think of a popular site that you maintain or run. Now think of all the inbound links that the site receives. Perhaps some of those you helped nurture, but how many of those are using poor SEO practices that aren’t living up to their full potential to boost the site higher in the rankings? By taking a few minutes to reach out to those who are linking to your sites you can have a measurable impact on your search rankings by making sure people focus on quality links and not just random links.
Many links are an SEO nightmare. They either are linking to the wrong content (or pages that no longer exist) or the anchor text, if it exists, has absolutely nothing to do with the content they are linking to. By taking a proactive approach to managing inbound links you can help a number of sites that link to you use proper SEO techniques. Keeping an eye on new inbound links and reaching out to new linkers in a timely fashion can help you more than you might imagine.
Of course you have no control over what people do outside of your site, but a little politeness through a carefully crafted e-mail can do wonders. Sure, you will never convert 100% of the people to forming SEO friendly links, but even converting 25% of them can really help you.
First, how are you going to know when new inbound links point to your site? Your best resource is your logs – one of the most underutilized data sources on the web. Your web logs contain a treasure trove of rich data that can be used for SEO purposes. By monitoring them for new referrers you can find out who the new kids on the block are and reach out to them to help build your brand.
There are others way, as well. Various reputation monitoring services exist out there and of course Google and Yahoo have strong web master tools that help you monitor inbound links. If you haven’t already, be sure to setup Google to alert you whenever new links and mentions of your websites appear!
Next, focus in on three main things in your email:
- Proper anchor text
- Link to pages that actually exist (and remove any query strings)
- Adding multiple links to other pages of interest on your site
Some of this can be automated, and a craft coder could write a script to parse logs looking for new links and response codes quite easily. However, even if you have to do this manually for a while you may find taking a few minutes to craft an email is a wonderful way to build a relationship with other sites that not only help you but can help them as well.
By keeping your “ears” to the ground you can find out about who is talking about you, your service or your site and help build your SEO rank at the same time.
Tue, Jan 27, 2009
Link Building