Beginner’s link development

OK, first post on how to actually get links. This stuff is very rudimentary. But don’t let that fool you. What I’m about to show you needs to be both the starting point for developing links to your site, and the basis for your link development - the foundation as it were.

These techniques will seem crude and rudimentary. And they’re work to implement. But the work. The difference between many successful SEO campaigns and those that fail is whether or not you do the grunt work to lay the foundation. So don’t say I didn’t warn you - ignore this stuff and you might as well not even bother.

Here’s the dealo. We are going to go looking for links in the following locations:
- sites that rank
- sites that link to sites that rank
- sites that rank on related terms

Now I’m not going to show screenshots as I don’t want some poor soul to get inundated with link requests. But lets use ‘mortgages’ as our target market.

First, go to Google and search on mortgages. There you go - thousands of sites talking about mortgages.
Next, hover over each listing and click your scroll wheel. In firefox this will open up a new tab in the browser. Click, click click on each of the top 10 listings. Go to the second page, click click click. And so on. Do this for the first 100 results.

No browse through each of those sites. Do any of them look like they might give you a link? If so - send them a personalized email. If they look like they won’t give you a link, close the tab and move on. In any regard you’ve just looked at a 100 relevant sites. Maybe you get two or a half a dozen link requests.

Wasn’t that easy? Sure it was. And the difference between those that rank and those that don’t, is that those that rank actually sat down and did this very boring exercise. Repeatedly. Over and over.

But that’s only 100 sites to look at. Let’s find some more. Let’s search on ‘related’ terms. Do the following searches:
- mortgage brokers
- morgages (a typo)
- mortgage rates
- mortgage application
- online mortgages
- mortgage rates online
- mortgage calculators
and so on.

For each of those terms, repeat as above. Open up and visit each of the first 100 results. You will start seeing duplicates which will speed things up a bit. But keep searching - any term you can think of. Let’s say you do 20 terms. You’ve just evaluated 2000 websites and sent out 40 to 100 link requests. Let’s say you get 10 of those back. Booya! 10 links! That’s 10 more than your competitors have.

Sorry, that’s not sexy. But it just plain works.

Now let’s kick it up a notch. Who better to link to us, than sites that link to those sites that are already ranking? Why, nobody of course - that’s who we want to link to us. First we know that links from those sites do make a site rank, and secondly, if they link to our competitors they might also link to us.

So, lets go back to the Google search on ‘mortgages’. Open the first result in a new tab (again using the scroll wheel to open the URL in a new tab). Now click that tab so we’re looking at the site. Let’s see who links to that site.

Right click on your search status plugin. Select ‘Show Backward Links’ > ‘Domain External Only’ > ‘Yahoo’. That will show the first 1000 backlinks to the top ranking website. So we’ve got 1000 websites that link to a mortgage site. Let’s go have a look!

Open each of those sites in a new browser tab. Have a look at the site, and where they link to your competitor. If it looks like they might give you a link, send them an email asking for one politely. Mention that since they’re already linking to your competitor (or ‘I notice you’re linking to mycompetitor.com, I’ve got a similiar site, would you consider linking to me as well please?’) maybe they’d link to you.

Repeat 1000 times.

Now go to the second site in the Google search for mortgages. Open it up in a new browser. Check the backlinks to that site using the searchstatus plugin.

Repeat for the top 50 results for the search term mortgages - i.e. check the backlinks of all the top ranking sites.

Now repeat again for all those related terms.

You’ve just reviewed 50 sites X 1000 backlinks each X say 20 terms. A million sites. So don’t give me any crap about not being able to find people to link to you. Somewhere in those million sites are quite a few who’d be happy to link to you just because you asked nice. Let’s say you send 5 emails out per 100 sites visited. That’s 50,000 emails. (note; these must be personalized emails. Do not automate.). If you get say one in 10, you’ve just developed 5000 backlinks to your site.

Isn’t that some funny math? 5000 backlinks. And no fancy footwork either. Just gruntwork.

I can’t emphasize enough - this is one of the bigger ’secrets’ in the SEO industry. Just do the work. Find relevant websites and ask them nicely for a link. Over and over and over. Boring yes. Tedious yes. Sexy, not so much. Works? Like crazy it does.

If you did nothing else than this you can get enough backlinks in most industries to rank decently. That’s it! Just do the work - that’s what’ll seperate you from everyone else. And the more search terms you can think of - related, and in related industries - the more of a platform you have to find people to link to you.