Be prepared as many of these site owners will not want to link back to you unless your site is relevant and has something of value to offer such as high quality pages with great content. You may need to explain that your current ranking is low but your website team is actively working on several projects to improve website traffic and relevant backlinks over the next few months and we fully intend to improve our rankings in all the major search engines.

You will have a better success rate if you already have a link in place to their site and give them the exact URL to your page linking to their site. Also provide them with the exact link text and URL to use linking back to your site. You will want to mix up this link text (anchor text) and try having different sites link back not only to your home page but other pages deeper within your site structure using different anchor text containing keywords for those specific pages.

Always follow up with a thank you message to the sites that link back to your website.

This method of linking is two way linking or reciprocal linking and is not as highly valued to the search engines as one way links to your site. More on other methods of linking to come in future postings.

Warning One: Be careful not to purchase links in order to improve page ranking. Google’s Statement on Webmaster Tools: “Some site owners attempt to “buy PageRank™” in the form of paid links to their sites. Buying links to improve PageRank violates our quality guidelines”

Warning Two: Stay away from link farms or link exchange systems. These systems used to work in the past but are now considered “Unnatural Linking” by most search engines. If anything make sure the sites you are linking with are relevant to yours and they don’t links going out to banned or questionable sites.

The golf course is calling again…Happy seo linking!!!