You'll Never Believe It – Spam!
Each day, millions of spam emails are sent around the world. You will know from your own inbox that much of this is pointless and useless to you. But, what if you could turn some of the emails that clutter your inbox into valuable content for your website? Here's how.....
Link building has always been high on the list of SEO strategies used by websites to improve search engine rankings, especially through attempts to pass Page Rank from higher PR sites. This is changing post-Panda and now with the dramatic change to Google's algorithm – Hummingbird. No longer are simple links with keyword-rich anchor text sufficient.
However, these changes to links policies will take a very long time to reach (and sink into) those who send out spammy link request emails. And we all get plenty of those each week.
Instead of simply ignoring cookie-cutter requests that start, “Hi, I have visited your website and think we have an excellent opportunity for sharing reciprocal links....”, use these emails to create a ‘How to Request a Link’ page on your website.
Point anyone who then sends you a link request to that page on your site. If there is a follow-up email, showing that this person has taken time to read your criteria, this is one hurdle overcome in finding potentially valuable linking partners.
Criteria To Evaluate Potential Link Partners Could Include:
- The approach must be personal, showing that the person emailing has made an effort to discover the right person to contact (and can spell their name correctly!)
- Who - Details of the website, its target audience, a hook (such as value of sales through the site or number of unique visitors per month)
- Where - Examples of where they believe a link on each site would be of most value to both parties. Ignorance of what your site is about is more than irksome; it shows that your time is being wasted.
- Why – what are the benefits of a reciprocal link to both parties (and it had better be more than just “You have a higher PageRank than us”)
- Examples, references and testimonials – examples of other reciprocal links and the results that have been enjoyed by those websites after sharing links. After all, if it such a great deal, you won't mind sharing the names of these people to confirm it, right?
Additional information on this ‘Request a Link’ page could include how long it may take for you to provide an answer, the fact that poor grammar and misspellings will lose points, that courtesy always helps, that links must be complementary, not competitive nor irrelevant to your target audience.
Also, include a mailto: link with appropriate subject line so you will know immediately if you receive a request that this person has taken the time to visit your page and is therefore one step further away from being simply spam.
Create a template email to send each time you receive an unsolicited link request, linking to that page and set up a filter for that subject line so that you can respond to such requests in a timely manner.
The same process can be followed for websites and blogs that accept guest posts and articles. By sharing your blogging criteria, asking for examples of published content by that author. By providing guidelines for submission as a guest blogger, you will cut down on the number of requests that take up your time, even if it is simply hitting ‘Delete’.
This way you can create more content with additional keywords on your website or blog to be indexed by the search engines and it will help bring targeted traffic to your site.
Speak to MintCopy today. Call us now at 888-646-8003 or send us an email to find out more.