Like Links? Begin With Top-notch Content

by Marcia Yudkin

These days, one of the best routes to traffic from search engines
is posting substantive content that has value for a particular
audience. Then you want to get that content linked like heck.
Inbound links increase your chances of rising in the search
engine ranks. When you've chosen an appealing topic, filled your
piece with meaty content and kept self-promotion to no more than
10 percent of the file, you should be able to arrange free links
with a lot of effort and no monetary outlay. Here's how I've done
it.

The obvious, head-on type of link campaign would involve visiting
a search engine, plunking in the keywords that would index your
bait piece and screening the sites that turn up, selecting those
likely to be receptive to a link request. Best bets: non-
commercial information sites trying to offer comprehensive links
to quality resources in your topic area. For linking to your bait
piece, forget brochure sites of companies and professional firms
unless they include a sizable link directory.

Because this method forces you to screen out so many poor
candidates for links, I use a more backhanded technique. First I
identify a well-established site or page containing substantive
bait that targets the very audience I would like to reach. By
"well-established," I mean something from a respected source that
has been on the Web for at least a year -- the longer the better.
Then I perform a link search to hone in on sites that have linked
to the well-established site's bait.

For instance, when looking for sites to link to my resources for
freelance writers, I sifted through sites linking to the late
lamented Inkspot, which predated me on the Web by a couple of
years. When looking for link candidates in the solo-professional
category for my marketing and publicity resources, I performed a
link search on predecessor Working Solo.

Several of the major search engines make a link search easy to
do. For example, at Altavista.com, if I wanted to find which
sites had linked to the ClickZ Network, I would type: (without
the quotation marks) "+link:clickz.com -site:clickz.com" into the
search box. This asks Altavista to find all pages linking to
clickz.com except pages within the ClickZ domain itself.

You can also use free-standing services set up for precisely this
kind of search, such as linkpopularity.com, which provides easy
access to the links turned up by Altavista, Hotbot and Google.

Now once you've identified sites you consider likely to add a
link to yours, how should you approach them? I'm not a big fan of
a "you link me, I'll link you..." overture. To me that implies
that your site lacks intrinsic value and that you have to add an
incentive to become worthy of the link. Also, you'll often find
sites you don't want to link to (because they're amateur-looking
or contain nothing distinctive, for instance) but still want
links from. Instead, I tell the Webmaster or site owner that I'm
writing to tell them about a new resource on ___ that would make
their list of links even more valuable, or more comprehensive.

If you are creating a master list of topical links for your own
site, it works well to say that you've linked to them and would
they consider a link in return? This makes most people curious
enough to check your site and reciprocate where appropriate.

Make sure your link request is patently personal, a genuine one-
to-one message. And instead of merely providing a URL that you
invite them to check out, provide the title of your bait piece
and say something about its value to their site visitors.
Something in the format of a press release, or any kind of
carbon-copy message, will definitely not yield the results you
want.

I have to admit that even with the strategy outlined above, the
quest for links is tedious and slow. Don't even get started with
it unless you feel relaxed, with a long evening ahead of you.
You'll encounter frequent frustration when you find a perfect
link candidate and comb the site in vain for the Webmaster or
site owner's e-mail address -- indeed, any contact information at
all.

Above all, remember that links to your bait piece are not the end
in themselves. You've installed your bait within your site, so
that any inbound link to your information piece stimulates
readers who find it valuable to explore the rest of your site and
buy your products or sign on as clients. That's the real goal of
all this work!

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Marcia Yudkin <marcia@yudkin.com> is the author of Poor Richard's
Web Site Marketing Makeover and 10 other books. Her site review
service tells you what, if anything, you need to change at your
site to turn visitors into customers and clients. Details:
http://www.yudkin.com/sitereview.htm

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