This is when you reach out to other website owners and ask them for a link, which SEOs often refer to as “link outreach.” But you can’t possibly reach out to the folks at datasciencecentral.com and ask them to link to your page with cookie recipes, right? You need to pick websites that are somehow related to your page, since they are more likely to actually consider your request. The process of collating a list of relevant websites to reach out to is called “link prospecting.” And the more effort you invest into finding suitable outreach targets, the higher your success rate would be.
But there’s one simple thing you can do to skew the odds in your favor
Think about it. If today you got a cold email from a random person asking for a link, would you even bother replying? I doubt so. But what if that email comes from someone whom you’ve previously talked to on Twitter or maybe even met at some in-person event? You’ll be a lot more likely to pay attention, right? Thus, if you start connecting with industry email list folks from your industry in advance (and maybe even do small favors for them), you’ll have no issues reaching out with a link request at some point in future. Here’s a good example from my own experience. Gael Breton from Authority Hacker first reached out to me back in 2014. That was before I even joined Ahrefs:
Buying links
This is the easiest way to build links. A lot of website owners would be happy to link to you if you pay them for it. But exchanging money (or anything else, really) for links is quite risky. Google Marketing List considers it a manipulation of its algorithm. And it might punish you for it by kicking your website out of the search results. Another risk of buying links comes from simply wasting your money on bad links that won’t even work in the first place. That being said, we don’t want to teach you any tactics that might put your business (or your wallet) at risk. So there would be no tips on “how to buy links the right way” in this guide.
