Remember, a sustained interaction with blog and website owners can result in a deeper business partnership, at times, which can benefit you well beyond just seeking a link. On the other hand, if they refuse to give you a link, don’t lose heart and make the mistake of ignoring them. Be gracious and thank them for considering your request.

Find out if you may contact them again in the future for other pieces of content. In essence, a personalized always helps during link  building.

Locating the links

As we’ve considered in an earlier post, the first step in a link building exercise is to list your USPs, as this lets you find quality links faster. Now, let us know about the next important step; it’s obviously to locating the links you want.

For this, the key is to get down to basics. I mean, simply Google it! Let’s take here a practical example of a USP of company having environmentally friendly credentials. A search as obvious as ‘list of environmentally friendly companies’ can deliver some good results, and to narrow them down a bit, you may try adding ‘inurl:links’, which suggests Google to only display results where the URL is comprised of the term ‘links.’

A simple addition like this will reduce or curtail down results significantly to make them more focused. More importantly, such minor modifications help throw a better set of results and hence create a greater chance of seeking quality links faster.

Relevance of guest blogging

Guest blogging can bring several benefits and can serve as an effective link building technique. Depending on the scale of your guest blogging, you may leave keywords for creating less specific search results that can well open up new areas. A search query like ‘inurl:guest-post –how to – seo’ can be tried out to find attractive opportunities.

The one I’ve suggested works on a premise that several blog owners will probably highlight the particular post – being a guest one within the title. This then will put the wording into the requisite URL. Similar to the one suggested above, something like ‘inurl:label/guest –how to –seo’ is essentially aimed at Blogspot blogs, though results may vary. The key is experiment to tap plenty of such opportunities.

Another good option is ‘inurl:category/guest’, as most standard WordPress blogs will generally use this structure for their respective URL so you tend to get satisfactory results. On the other hand, the advantage of ‘keyword +blog +november 2010 inurl:guest’ is that you’re narrowing down your results in such a manner as to only display active posts.

Looking for directories

Finding Directories that are least likely to land you into any problem is another tricky area. Try out a search query like ‘keyword inurl:directory –buy –anchor text –pagerank –pr’ to find directories unlikely to create an issue fro you. You may add all sorts of additional terms to this. The idea is to not to source links from a directory giving links in order to blatantly pass anchor text and PageRank in lieu of monetary benefits.