Linking Request, Record Keeping, Ongoing Monitoring

Inside This Article

1.	Why websites exchange links
2.	How to choose good link partners

3.	User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly Link Directory
4.	How to maintain your link directory

How to maintain your link directory

Before you send link request emails, you need to publish your link text and link description on your site so that your potential link partners can simply copy and paste on to their websites.

Record Keeping

It's important you keep decent records about your existing link partners and potential link partners.

For each link partner, write down the following information:

Domain URL
Webmaster's name
Contact email address
Link exchange status
- Created: record has been added for your link partner on your link page. link request email has not been sent yet.
- Waiting: link request email was sent but link back has not been done.
- Declined: the potential link partner refused to link back to you.
- Accepted: the potential link partner agreed to link back to you.
- Completed: link exchange completed.
Date of the above status occurred

For record keeping, the simplest way is to use Notepad or other text pad programs. Make sure each link partner domain URL is unique in your list. Every time when you enter a new link partner, do a search. If not found, it's a new partner. Otherwise, it's an existing one. You can also use Microsoft Excel.

The best way to record link partners' information is to use a database. The advantage of using a Database Management System (DBMS) is that link partners domain URLs can be enforced to be unique by setting unique constraint. Basically, two tables with one-to-many relationship is sufficient - LinkPartner and RequestStatus.

Microsoft Access is a good alternative and is available to most Windows users. Remember to put a Unique Index on the DomainURL column.

The above introduced schemas can only achieve basic record keeping. To make your tracking more productive and hassle free, check out the award winning professional link exchange management software IBP link building tool.

IBP link building tool can dramatically simplify the above mentioned process. It has more link exchange status than I suggested above and it guarantees uniqueness as well. You can explore the email history log and easily track where, when, what you have communicated with link partners. IBP link building tool allows you to quickly find out which link partners you've already contacted and how often you've contacted them.

Link Request Email Messages

IBP link building tool provides 15 ready-to-use and customizable email templates. Email templates are also discussed in IBP's free e-book Successful Search Engine Marketing. The section on page 27 (sample success letter) and advanced tips on page 43 about how to create email message templates are the must read ones.

Always customize your email with the webmaster's name. Normally you can find this information from the contact page of a site.

To facilitate the link exchange process, including the following information is crucial:

Briefly introduce yourself.
Indicate which page and category on your site you have linked to their site.
Your link url, link text and link description; or, provide a link to a page on your site that contains this kind of information.
Format your email to 65 characters or less per line. More than 65 characters per line will most likely distort the email body on the recipient's end.

After you send out link request emails and updated your record keeping file, wait for a few days to two weeks for a reply. The webmaster may be too busy to reply or you might have used a wrong email address. You can politely follow up if you don't get a reply after two weeks. Also consider adjust your message if you see a poor response ratio.

Ongoing Monitoring

Spend some time every week to periodically check if your link partners websites still link back to you.

When found a link partner dropped your link on his/her link page, you should NOT immediately drop his/her link on your site. Instead, do the following to verify first.

Check if the link partner has moved your link to another category or page. You can check the link page by yourself or email the link partner to ask. Sometimes you link may be accidentally removed.
If your link can't be found, email your link partner and politely ask him/her to consider putting it back.

If the above action does not work, then you can remove the link partners URL from your site.

Ongoing monitoring by yourself takes a lot of time. Alternatively, IBP link building tool does a good job in this regard.

This is what IBP link building tool can do. When a link partner has put up a link to your site, enter the URL of that Web page in the "URL of the page that contains a link to your site" edit field in the Edit Link panel in IBP link building tool. This allows you to periodically check if the link to your site is still there or if it has been removed.

Use the "Check Links" feature in IBP link building tool to check if your link partners still link back to your site. You can start the link check in the "Check Links" panel at the bottom of the main window.

The link check feature of IBP link building tool allows you to quickly check if your link partner sites still exist, if they still link back to your site and if the banners your link partner provided still work (optional). That way, you will always have an up-to-date link directory if you use IBP link building tool.

Diversify your links

Google is smart enough to detect link manipulation patterns. So make sure you link to sites with different PageRank and different page types.

You should not only have links with sites that have higher PageRank than yours.

At the end of the day, it is the amount of targeted traffic that will make your bottom-line solid. Traffic comes from numerous sources and PageRank only has to do with your Google ranking, not to say it is hard to get a good PR.

You should also link to dynamic pages created by asp, php, or any other server-side scripting languages.

This statement is concerned with search engines' capability to crawl dynamic pages. Read my article Search Engines and Dynamic Web Pages to understand what kind of dynamic pages can cause difficulties to search engine crawlers.

Conclusion

Link building takes time, a lot of time. In the medium and long run, your effort will be very well rewarded by flood of targeted traffic from both your link partners and search engines.

Inside This Article

1.	Why websites exchange links
2.	How to choose good link partners

3.	User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly Link Directory
4.	How to maintain your link directory

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1.	Why websites exchange links

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