5 Tips to Perfect your Link Building Outreach

• Link building outreach is a tough endeavor. We've found some great link targets for our clients but have very little success in our email outreach. Can you provide some tips to best refine our link outreach efforts and convert more of these opportunities for our clients in 2014?

Answer: As we've said here several times in SEN, if a link is easy to get it's not a quality link. There is no better evidence to support this than when one conducts link building outreach by email. This type of outreach is notorious for having a low conversion rate.

How many of you reading this have spent hours conducting extensive link research to find just the right linking opportunity for your client? You've studied the site, you've tracked down the right contact information for the Webmaster, and you've written and rewritten your initial link pitch multiple times. You've even sent a follow-up, and then maybe one more, and weeks later you realize that the result of all your outreach emails was...nothing. No link and in most cases, no response.

You're not alone. We get link outreach requests ourselves all the time, sometimes four to five times a day. Most of them are truly horrible; a select few, though are, not so bad. Those that aren't horrible share some specific characteristics and they are simple tips that we as link builders utilize in our own outreach efforts and which we know will be effective in yours.

As such, if you are conducting email link outreach for your clients (and you should be) here are some best practices and tips that will help dramatically increase your conversion success:

• 1. Know your Link Target: Mass emails are so 1997. As we mentioned above you should be personalizing your pitch to the appropriate person as much as possible. Checkout a tool like Who.is to find the Webmaster contact information or use Mail Tester to test variations of specific...