This is the most common form of link building, and the most tedious. It involves the manual hunt for e-mail addresses for webmasters, and link forms to fill out. This process takes a long period of time, because of the hunting, recording and e-mailing. The response levels are generally very poor, and the results from manual link development are not noticeable for long periods of time unless this is being utilized in a mass form (using teams of link builders).
However, with all of its faults, it is still a method popular within the SEO community, and can still help towards ranking success.
Ok, so for manual link development we need to do 3 things, these are:
Find potential backlink partners
Create e-mails to approach them
Implement a link on a positive response
First of all, you may wonder how you can find backlink partners, well, before you do you need to know what to look for.
Remember earlier on we talked about backlink volume and quality, well, you need to know that the links you are building are from a quality resource. Good quality links are worth the time and effort spent in manual link development.
Using manual link development for poor quality links is a waste of time and offers very minimal benefits. Instead, lets utilize this process to find the best quality of links.
What are Good Quality Links:
Good quality backlinks are links that come from other quality websites. Other websites that are optimized and are relevant to your website are good candidates. Try to avoid competition where possible, identify relevant websites that are not direct competition.
Good websites meet the following criteria:
1. The website is relevant to your website, if your website sells tyres for cars, then a relevant website would be a car mechanics website.
2. The website does not have thousands of links to other websites, if the website links page is full of mixed theme links then the value of the link is more neglible.
3. The website has a good content base and is indexed in Google, avoid websites that are not indexed in Google.
4. The website has a domain age of at least 1 year and has entries in the way back machine (www.archive.org)
5. The website has lots of useful content on.
6. The website has some form of page rank
That isn't everything, but it covers the main areas for now. Obide by those guidelines to locate good quality websites.
Lets run through the process of finding potential backlinks:
Step 1: Open up Google in your Internet Browser:
We are going to use Google to find potential backlink partners. We will use the search functionality and will learn how to identify the quality of the links.
Step 2: Use the following query to locate websites:
Use a query in the search box which will filter through millions of websites to find potential link partners:
The following query is structured as follows:
Intitle:"" inurl:"links"
We want to tailor this towards your website, so, find a keyword relevant to your website, just 1 keyword or keyword group, in this example, we are going to use lawnmowers, so
intitle:"Lawnmowers" inurl:"links"
Replace lawnmowers with your websites keywords, you could use "Car Tyres" "Shopping" "Cat Food" absolutely anything as long as its relevant to your websites keywords:
Enter the query into Google Search
intitle:"Lawnmowers" inurl:"links"
Then click search:
Step 3: Analyse the returned index:
Once you have performed the search you will be presented with a list of search results.
Notice how the URL's all have the keyword "Links" in them. This is because the search query has filtered the results to return websites relative to the query, in this case we have asked Google to look for websites with "Lawnmowers" in the title tag, and "Links" in the URL.
These websites are all potential candidates:
Step 4: Select any website from the search results
Click on any one of the results, and let the website load up.
Here is one of the results from Google that we clicked on.
Once you are on the website result all you then need to do is find either an e-mail address or an exchange links section.
Once you have done this, you have then located a backlink.
You can use the details by finding one of the following
Contact Us
Submit Link
Link to Us
Exchange Links
Links
Resources
Find anything like that on the website you have landed on, in an attempt to make contact with the webmaster. It is advisable to record these e-mails or URL's in a spreadsheet so that you can manage the links as they are e-mailed or respond.
Once you have done this, you can go through the other websites in Google's index. Some keyword results may give you thousands of results whilst others may give you minimal results.
Once you have finished, why not change the query to another keyword such as
Intitle:"Grass Cutters" inurl:"links"
The possibilities are endless.
