How To Establish A Path To Link-Building

Link-building is an essential aspect of organic search engine optimization (SEO), and websites that fail to capitalize on this are frequently left in the cold. While there are occasional phenoms that explode on their own, those are miracle odds in a day and age where literally millions of people are throwing their own pitch on the web. The jarring part is that most of those people likely have more than one venture, which further concentrates the amount of content that can be picked up on a search engine.

For those not in the know, link-building describes a process wherein two websites will provide links to one another on their own respective sites, establishing a connection of relevance between them that can promote mutual growth on search engine results. Over time, this can dramatically improve the visibility of your website because a portion of those other websites' traffic is being directed to yours either through the shared link or because your site was listed next to theirs in a search engine result. This improves exposure and accelerates growth. However, getting other sites to agree to a link-share, while deceptively win-win, is another matter entirely.

Some owners resort to cold emails, a more contemporary incarnation of cold calls. These involve unsolicited emails to people who have never made contact with you before and aren't in your contacts. While it sounds like a bad thing, it's actually quite different from spam. The problem is that many recipients of link-building offers through email will view them as spam and ignore, delete or flag your request.

Fortunately, link-building is often just this simple. Unfortunately, that also means there isn't much else to do for outreach. The principle concept involves finding the owner's email published on their site somewhere and then launching a message to them with the inquiry. In truth, most owners won't actually respond let alone agree to the proposal, but this is normal. In fact, probably 3-10 percent of those who you cold email will bother to read the request, and maybe half will actually agree to it.