EZ Link Exchange Part 2
Identifying Link Partners
The first thing is to identify websites that would make suitable link partners. These are sites that complement your own, and therefore have a similar visitor profile to the type you are looking for. For instance a website selling health food might link up with a website about physical fitness. Be creative about your choices; set up a spread sheet to keep track of your approaches.
Visit the top 10 or 20 sites ranked in Google and Yahoo! for your keywords and do some research on their link partners. You will find not only do they have several link partners, but partners that are quality sites for their content, linking strategy, aesthetic appeal and so on. These are the sites you should target for a link exchange request. Note: The major search engines are reducing the number of links they’ll show for each site, to cut down on search engine spamming. You may thus find a specialized tool is necessary. A good one for his purpose would be SEO Elite which is a complete reciprocal links exchange management tool.
Assess the sites you short-list for their relevance and complementarities to your own. Ensure that they are quality sites (if they are link partners of the top ten sites in your niche they generally will be, but take nothing for granted).
Assess them for:
Linking Website - this is the specific website linking to the rival websites in your niche that you are benchmarking. In order to find all of the websites that link to them go to Google and enter this search criteria: link:www.targetedwebsite.com. Once you do this Google will return a list of websites that link to www.targetedwebsite.com. You will get a larger list by going to Yahoo! and entering link:http://targetedwebsite.com. Note: that for Yahoo you must include http://
Anchor Text used - is the actual text used within the link, linking to the specified website. For example, the anchor text in the following link would be “health food”. Health food website.
Page Rank - is the actual Google Page Rank of the webpage linking to www.targetedwebsite.com. In order to see the Google Page Rank,
you’ll need to download and install the Google Toolbar for free from: http://toolbar.google.com
Link Popularity - is the number of links that are pointing to each of the webpages pointing to www.targetedwebsite.com. The more the merrier. Go to a website like www.linkpopularity.com to find each link partners link popularity quickly and comprehensively.
Page Title - is the title of the page that is linking to targetedwebsite.com. Does it contain the main keyword(s) for your niche? If so, you should note the url (web address) of those pages. You’ll want to approach those websites and try to get them to link to your website.
* Getting links from webpages that contain your main keyword in the page title is extremely powerful and is something many people often overlook.
Number of Outbound Links - is the number of links located on the webpage linking to www.targetedwebsite.com. The fewer links there are located on the page, the more a link from them would increase your ranking.
Once we’ve collected all of the information, we now can see targetedwebsite.com’s linking strategy. We’ll need to calculate the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords/phrases in the page title, and the percentage of websites that contain the main keywords in the actual anchor text linking to www.targetedwebsite.com.
You’ll have to do this for the top 10-20 websites in your keyword niche in order to properly establish the most beneficial websites to seek link exchanges with.
The most beneficial sites will be those that:
a) Allow you to specify the anchor text that will be used in their link to your website.
b) Websites with a PR OF 4 or more - don’t get too hung up on page rank though.
c) Websites that will preferably carry your link in a relevant page. Failing that, a website that has a well-organized links page with a visible and hopefully prominent link in the navigation bar, so that visitors can find it easily.
d) Should the website use a special links page, then ensure that it carries no more than 30 links, otherwise the PR benefit from that links page will be so diluted as make it worthless. Also, there’ll be too many links competing with yours to get any significant traffic boost.
Making Your Link Request
Now that you have established the websites you want to link with, you need go out and actually ask them. How you do this will determine whether your linking campaign will be effective or not; it would be a great pity to do all the work above only to mess it up with a shoddy links exchange request.
Firstly, websites that are worth linking to receive hundreds of link requests. In order to get your request any attention, prepare well so that it stands out from the crowd. You want to show the webmaster that you have taken the time to peruse his website and that your links exchange request is well considered. You need to convince him/her that your website would make a good fit with their own, that it is interesting, and his/her own visitors would find it useful and beneficial. You also want to make it as easy as possible for them to link up with your site.
When you write the links exchange request letter, personalize it by using the webmaster’s first name if you can find it on his/her site, make sure you have specified the website’s name, and note and comply with any instructions the website may have for exchanging links e.g. a web-based form, a code to cut and paste on to your site and so on. Failing to do so would not just be irritating; it shows that you have not really browsed the site.
Be creative and bold with your email subject header. Being timid and using a generic subject header like “Link Request” will probably see your email deleted unread. Explicitly state which page you’d like your link carried on and why. Oftentimes, interestingly, you’ll get your links request approved without a reciprocal link exchange. Some webmasters will consider either that it may not make sense for them to have their link on your site, or that your site is a valuable enough addition to their site without a link in return. Most times though, a reciprocal exchange will result.
Do not balk at approaching your competitors. Since no two business entities are identical, it is possible for competing websites to carry each others links and still benefit from the total traffic carried by all. Imagine sites that sell unique and therefore hard to find gift items. While obvious competitors, if a surfer fails to find what they’re looking for on one site, they may find it on the other, and vice-versa.
Page Rank
A word about Page Rank. PR is a measure of a website’s significance derived and used by certain search engines chiefly Google. While a positive indicator, you should not get too hung up on it when identifying link partners.PR is gained and lost often (every 3 months or so) so current PR is no indicator of future trends. Further, PR is largely an indicator of link popularity, is obscure in its derivation, and does not tell you how suitable a website is as a link partner. Use it as an indicative measure rather than a deciding factor.
Google PR increases as your link popularity does. Building links with quality websites many of which will have low PR initially, but websites that have the type of traffic your site needs will invariably lead to a higher PR evetually.
Enjoy your Link Building.
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