Like Links? Begin With Top-notch Content

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!