Link Building - Tips for Emailing

Part of any link building strategy involves contacting the webmaster of the sites you have identified as good targets. The most unobtrusive way of doing this is by email. It is not pushy & means that people can get back to you at their leisure. That said, because email is more leisurely & less pressured, you need compelling reasons why people should link to your content.


Eric Ward at Search Engine Land has identified a typical email that might be sent:


Greetings;
My name is Ga+++++ +++++++++, and I'm in charge of getting links of web site. I have visited your site http://www.ericward.com/articles/index.html and I believe a link exchange could benefit us both.
I'm offering you the following: If you place a link to my site in just one single page in your website, I'll place a link to your website in 3 different sites. I'll provide you the details. These are my sites info:
Title: Web marketing GroupURL: http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/Description: Online marketing solutions delivering measurable results. Services include search engine optimisation, website design and digital magazines.
And these are the sites where I would place a link to your site:
http://www.wmwebtech.com/ : PR6http://www.dcadultliteracy.org/ : PR6http://www.usalah.org/ : PR5
As you can see, all of these sites have a decent PR, so if you are interested, please add the link to your site, reply to this mail and I would gladly add your link in my sites after I verify them.
Thanks a lot for your attention, hope to hear back from you.
++++++++++oup.co.ukGab++++++ ++++

On the face of it, it's not too bad & you may well have sent something similar at some time, but, on closer inspection, there are a number of problems that would put off a number of webmasters.

These are:

ADDRESS - the address that this email is being sent to is wrong, this shows a slapdash approach. If you want to link to quality sites, you wouldn't expect to find one at the end of a poorly thought-out email. Furthermore, the emailer is mailing an address that has not asked for content form the site. This makes the email unsolicited.

IMPERSONAL - there is no name included despiste the link to the ericward.com website.

'GETTING LINKS' - this person is obviously paid to get links and so you might not trust the content.

JARGON - terms like 'link exchange' and 'PR' are used which might be of no use to the webmaster.

GMAIL ADDRESS - although you might not be able to tell this, the email comes from a gmail account which is not very professional.


When people make the decision to link they want to link to relevant well-thought-out sites. They do not want to do it because a link exchange would be of benefit (this is not quantified), they just want to find good content.