Here at Vertical Measures we get a number of clients who wish for us to pursue Manual Link Building campaign for their website to improve the quality of backlinks to their pages. This involves going out to relevant websites, contacting the webmasters directly and promoting the client’s website to see if they would be interested in linking to the page anywhere on their site. The one thing that is always the same about the work that we do in this area for our clients is that it is always different.‘It depends’ is a bit of a catch phrase in our office as it seems to be the answer to every question. What do you think is better, a high PR page but less relevant, or lower PR but right on topic? It depends. Is it better to get many links of lower quality, or one high quality link? It depends.
For manual link building efforts, it depends on the industry, it depends on the activities of their competitors, and above all it depends on the content of their website.
‘Content is king’ has never been more prevalent than when trying to convince a webmaster to link to a certain page. After all, you need to be providing some kind of value to their website and their website’s visitors.
We have had situations where success has come easily, with quality links on relevant pages with strong PR where all it took was a simple ‘may I recommend this site, I think you would really find it useful’. For some pages where the website we are link building for provides quality information, we have acquired links on .gov sites that no competing site could buy.
Yet we also have clients who wish to build links in this manner for pages that provide very little value or incentive for a website to link to them. Think about pages that just link to other resources and contain no unique information on the page itself. Asking website owners if they would like to link to these pages often results in a very simple response ‘Why would I?’.
For any website that wants to build quality links from relevant pages, manually contacting related websites is a great method, but your own site has to be adding value to the conversation. Use tools like the Competitive Link Finder or Link Research Tools to see the pages that are linking to your competitors. Ask yourself why they are linking to them and what your page could add as an additional resource.
If your page adds nothing extra, think about a redesign with additional content. If you can’t think of a reason for a site to link to your page, how can you expect an independent webmaster to send traffic your way?
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Tags: Link Building, manual link building
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 6:45 am and is filed under Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 5th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
You've covered two of the most common substantial questions that every SEO usually ask themselves before shooting for a certain campaign. One is to ask yourself if what's important; to link on high PR pages but offers irrelevant content to your site's niche, or to link on low PR pages but have relevant contents and second is having massive low quality backlinks or few quality links. Well as for my experience, I would still go for “quality”. 10 backlinks from high PR pages that is also relevant to your site's niche can benefit you in many ways — trustrank, pagerank as well as SERP ranking — way better than having hundreds of backlinks from irrelevant pages.
May 6th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
[...] Leveraging A Site for Manual Link Building, Vertical Measures [...]
December 23rd, 2010 at 4:14 pm
I am a little new at this but have researched the subject in depth. What I have have gathered comes from top ranked sites and web master’s. Have you ever seen a web site with a lower page rank, beat out a higher page ranked site in a search result? If you haven’t than you need a better pr checker. The reason this happens is because of content related to the search and the content of the links leading to the sites.
A site might be ranked higher but in a lot of cases this is more related to the domain name than the content. The links leading into the sight all contain the domains name. As a result the sight ranks high in it’s domain name. This is good if people are searching your name on a regular basis but lacks results for other key words.
If you want real results out of google and aren’t fortunate enough to have a search result friendly domain name. Than you need to look at content of your incoming links. Do some research and capitalize on their top key words. If your site has many subjects than you will need links to your inner pages from related sites. I have actually had a site that had a low pr home page and pr 3 inner page. The inner page had content that people wanted to share naturally.
Off topic but related to my comments. Google Adword has a search result checker. It allows you to search key words. It gives the amount of searches each month for certain words and phrases. It also shows you related searches. This is a must have tool for any one looking for a search engine friendly domain name