Quick SEO tips #3: Let them know you are linking to their content (and make valuable SEO partnerships)

 

Understatement of the year coming up: the web is not short of SEO tips.

In fact, you can barely breathe for the deluge of them out there.

 

But the tips in this series are offered in the spirit of less is more.

Each one will take you no time whatsoever to complete and it won’t require you to start learning new tricks.

Perfect for old dogs like us then!

 

In less time than your pasta takes to boil you can sauce up your SEO and start spaghetting real results.

Hey, pesto!

 

 

Sending emails to sites you have linked to

In many ways, a link is like a vote.

It’s your way of saying I love this content, it’s super useful and I recommend you check it out.

 

Google views every link as a vote too.

A vote of confidence and a vote of recognition.

This is why backlinks form such an important part of its algorithm. They offer a useful way to gauge the level of trust and popularity that content has.

 

So, you’ll find hundreds of experts offering 200 ways to build links for your site.

But not here.

I’m going to approach links in an entirely different way and show you how to reverse engineer valuable relationships that will help you as you try to boost your SEO.

And my starting point is not a link building hack but an act of reverence.

 

For example, in a recent post, I recommend the best SEO tools and SEO guides out there.

The first one, as you can see, is Screaming Frog.

 

 

 

It’s a tool I genuinely love and use all the time.

So, why not try and make some friends by telling the guys and gals at Screaming Frog how much I love their tool and that I have placed a link to them from my site?

 

The email doesn’t have to be too clever – in fact, the shorter the better.

It may go something like this:

 

Hey [First Name],

I am a long-time Screaming Frog uberfan and love your tool. So much so that I made my love public by recommending your tool as part of my online SEO guide.

I hope it sends some people your way who otherwise may not have reached you.

And I know they’ll find your crawls as helpful as I do.

Best,
Mat

 

Now you may be wondering where the request for a link back is.

In my experience, such brazen requests rarely deliver and instead they scupper what could be a great way to open a conversation and start a relationship by tainting it with a grubby expression of self-interest.

Assuming your content is unique and well-written, you’ll likely get a reply back saying ‘thanks for the love, you’re not so bad yourself.’

You may also get a share of this or future content, you may get an invite to speak at a conference, you may be asked to write a guest post and you may get a direct link to future content.

All this because you did not ask upfront.

Try it.