Step 5. Email your potential partners

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Only after you've placed a link to them, email the owner of the site a short, friendly note. Tell them you've linked to their site, giving them the URL of the page where you've placed your link — so that they could check it. Ask for a link back to your site, suggesting a page where the link would be appropriate.

My recommendations on writing emails to potential link partners

If possible, address him or her by name. Don't write too much or too little. You can genuinely praise something on the site — say, the product or service it offers. And say a couple of words about your site and why link exchange will be beneficial for the both of you — this helps you look more personal and trustworthy to the siteowner.

Here's a sample email that an imaginary Zack Wilson, webmaster of www.pizza-online.com could send to an imaginary Tom Anders, owner of www.food-online.com.

However this is just a sample, to show you the main points that are good to mention in an email. And you'd better write something in your own words. I'm sure you've got your own tricks to convince people into doing you a favor.

Now you've got an idea of how to offer someone to exchange links — and use maximum chances to get a link back. And let me repeat once again, as this is really important.

Be personal when you email potential link partners.

Step 6 (optional). Send a reminder

A week later, if there's been no reply, it's good to send a brief, polite reminder. It's easy for emails to be lost or overlooked. A link from a good site is a very valuable thing — so don't lose it just because you weren't noticed the first time.

This step is optional though — if you think that you got no reply because these partners simply aren't interested in link exchange, you may decide not to send reminders at all.

Step 7. Delete the link if the prospect did not exchange links

If you're still not getting a reply, or your potential partner refused to exchange links, remove the link to their site from your web page.

You'll need to get the page from the server and remove unnecessary links from the page's code. After that save this new page and upload it to the server. Again, most likely your webmaster will be doing this for you.

Step 8. Put the site into your record

Keep record of sites you've linked to and requested links from. Put down who you've contacted and who you haven't yet, who agreed and who refused to link to you and so on — as you'll be getting down to these records all the time. With hundreds of link partners, you may easily send two emails to the same person by mistake, or forget to send a couple emails — so keep records to avoid this.

And sure, it's crucial to know where a link to your site stands. When your link partners reply, they normally let you know where they put a link to you. So keep this information in your records, too.

Here's an example of an Excel sheet with such records:

Example of a partner list with remarks

Step 9. Check if the link to you is still there

You see, that's sad but true — some guys try to cheat: they put a link to you, send you a report saying "Thanx, here's a link we put on our page, and here's the page where we put it...". And then in a couple of weeks the link's no longer there — those guys simply removed it (or used other nasty tricks I'll tell you about later), thus they have a one–way link from you — and you're doing SEO charity.

So to make sure noone's leading you a dance, look in your records each week or so and check your partner's pages where they should have links to you. You can check each link by hand, or get some software that's verifying links rocket–fast and helps avoid all possible link cheating traps.

Pretty much that's it — doesn't sound too hard, right? Quite time–consuming though, but the algo is a simple win–win: you find a good site, link to them from your site, and ask them to link to you in exchange.

DO IT NOW! Start from looking for new partners and go accurately through all link building steps. I know it seems like some of them can be avoided, but if you want maximum results for your efforts and time, don't miss a single one of the 9 link building steps.

If you've got a new site, it's good to get at least 10–15 reciprocal links each day — this makes you link building look natural to search engines. When doing this, never overlook these steps — they're necessary to run through, with each link partner.

How fast do links grow?

Maybe that's a bit disappointing, but links don't grow as fast as mushrooms.

Here's a typical SOS email I often get from owners of new sites:

Ouch... does this situation sound familiar to anyone? To me — YES. Link exchange is a win–win, so you need to have something to offer, to get a link back. What's this "something"?

Of course this can be a high Google PageRank, or good traffic flows — but the #1 thing that should matter is content. If your site has useful content that might be valuable to the visitors of a Jack's site, the Jack might pretty well link to you — why not?

And don't ever get desperate at the very start. It's never easy for a new website, but as soon as you get over the beginner's challenge, you'll be surprised at how fast you gain speed.
I know the 9 steps may look to you now like a long walk, but as ever, there are ways to make any job faster and easier. This time, software's at your service to make link–building as easy as winking.

There's a brilliant SEO tool that was specially designed for link–building campaigns: LinkAssistant. That's the #1 choice of thousands website owners from all over the world — and they all say this program makes SEO tasks easy–to–do even for the most non–savvy guys.

I use it for my link building, too, and here I'll tell you how you grow your links and manage your link-building campaigns with the software without the usual effort. But even if you're not planning to use software, read the next pages and you'll learn a lot of useful stuff about link management.

Previous: Option 1: No cost link management by hand

Next: Option 2: Link building at ease — your personal LinkAssistant

 

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