SoloSEO

A Novel Link Building Technique - Optimize Existing Backlinks

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 25th, 2007

Link Building is an essential aspect of SEO because of the weight that search engines, particularly Google, place on the democratic nature of links and the web. The anchor text of a link is a very important aspect of backlinks (anchor text write-up). Getting backlinks is always a challenge, especially backlinks that have helpful anchor text (instead of “click here” and “good article”). But never fear, Michael Jensen is here to give you one more strategy up your sleeve.

Optimize Existing Backlinks

So you’ve got a bunch of backlinks already, but they use your name or “click here” as the anchor text. With this technique, all you’ve got to do is follow these simple steps:

STEP 1: Identify your backlinks

You can use Technorati to find who links to your blog, or use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see your backlinks from anywhere. Blog backlinks are a lot easier to modify, so that’s a good place to start. For Technorati, just search for your domain (like this for soloseo.com). For Yahoo! Site Explorer (might need a Yahoo User ID first) just type in the URL to your domain or page that you’re interested in (like this for soloseo.com). You’ll want to view “Inlinks” and choose “Show Inlinks except from this domain to entire site”.

STEP 2: Identify candidate links

Identify links that could potentially have the anchor text changed. Start with sites that you already have a relationship with (you know the site owner, blogger, etc.).

STEP 3: Assess URL and anchor text

Look at the page and see what the anchor text is and what page the link points to. If it just points to your domain, you can request just to have the anchor text updated to a keyword in one of your top 5 keywords for your site, or see if there is another page that may be better fitting their link, along with anchor text specific for that page. If the page links to a subpage, identify a keyword that fits the page.

STEP 4: Make the request

Figure out how to contact the site owner (About us page, contact us page, search googe for @thesitedomain.com, etc.) and draft a personalized email. You may consider offering some incentive, like a cash amount, a donation to charity of their choice, or some cool give-a-way you have.

STEP 5: Keep Track and Follow-up

Keep track of your link update requests by recording them somewhere. SoloSEO has a way to manage your link building so that might be a good fit. If you get a response, or notice the link changed, be sure to follow up with a nice “Thank you!!”.

Update: I noticed a link today to an article I wrote from 10e20.com about the Search Marketing faceoff between Presidential candidates that mentioned my post about the 2008 Presidential Candidates and SEO but it referenced the WebProNews.com syndication of my blog post instead of mine. This would seem like another good place to see if they would point it to the original article instead. How about it Jake?

Visited 2066 times June 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Entry Filed under: SEO