There’s nothing more annoying than opening your email and seeing 100 new topics saying “link exchange” or something along those lines. Its not that link exchanges are not good or that I don’t want to get more links, but I know that as soon as I open the email, there will be a spill on why links are benefitial or a whole essay on the basics of SEO. Moreover, the site that some people ask me to link to are of such poor quality, I wouldn’t even want to look at it, let alone refer my visitors to their site. Anyway, that’s all the negative stuff out of the way. Here’s a few things to keep in mind when you email other sites for link exchanges.

1/ Keep it simple and short - Again, its annoying to see 500 word emails on why link exchanges are good. The majority of webmaster already know this and there really isn’t any point wasting the webmasters time, talking about how link exchanges work. A simple paragraph, at most two, will be sufficient to see if other webmasters are interested in linking or not.

2/ Offer a decent link back - What I hate the most, are outsourcing companies offering links on their spammy link directories where they list 100 other sites. To me it doesn’t matter if its a “themed page”. Whats the chances of someone clicking on my link if there are 100 other links on that page? Offer a link on a quality page where qualified visitors would be able to see it. The page should at least be related which is not only good for the site your linking to but also for yourself. It shows your visitors that you do provide good resources if your site does not have it already.

3/ Be personal - You will be instantly a mile ahead of others if you make the effort to find out the name of the person in charge of link exchanging for a site. Let them know you have gone through their site and maybe pick out a few good aspects you found.

4/ Subject - The subject “link exchange”,”link request” or anything similar could trigger spam alert to webmasters immediately. Try something that’s more eye catching. For example “PR5 site link partnership” (PageRank isn’t everything by the way), “I’m Linking to Your great site!”, “(Name), I love your site” or anything that you can think of that is more appropriate to your offer.

5/ Statistics - This can always help webmaster decide whether your link is good for them or not. Stats like the number of visitors, type of visitors on your pages, what people purchase on your site or sign up to.

I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing link building to anyone (unless you are 100% sure they know what they’re doing). From what I’ve seen, I haven’t noticed any outsourcing company within a reasonable price that does a proper job of link building. Now Im sure there are outsourcing companies out there who can do the job so if you know one that doesn’t charge a fortune, let me know.

Refer to my other post on identifying quality links as these two posts would go hand in hand in link building campaigns. Don’t use software to send spammy emails to every site in your niche market. Send the emails manually.