There's an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters' inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient's Trash:

• "Hi, Let’s swap links!"
• "I’ve already linked to you."
• "Great site!"
• "You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better/complementary product."
• "Please use the following text in your link…"

When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. "Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links." Just don't be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.

We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here's one I got recently:

Subject: Quality link request

Hello,

I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.

We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.

We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I'm sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.

To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.

Please reply to all@acemobilitychoice.co.uk to say where you have uploaded it.

If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.

I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.

Thank you.

Regards
Jessica


Please note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]

All I've got to say to that is, "Yeah, right!"

Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday's link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren't MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it's well worth it!), I'll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.

Writing articles is a great way to improve your search engine positioning – in fact some of the top referring keywords come from articles.

But do they produce leads? Possibly not, but articles are great for promoting your brand. You will be quoted in everything from college papers, class projects, theses, and blogs. Many of these will link back to you. Spiders will visit your site looking for new content. Combine it with RSS and you have a powerful way of syndicating those articles globally.

SearchEnginePosition's Rob Sullivan has written an interesting article about his own experience, which you can read here.

You've probably heard me say this before, that links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. Therefore, no links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.

I am speaking at a MarketingProfs virtual seminar on Feb. 16 on "Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization" along with link guru Eric Ward. Sign up now!

One of the many topics we will be discussing in next week's webinar is "link baiting" — making your site an irrestistible link target for bloggers and site owners. The Art of Linkbaiting has some great suggestions (particularly if you've got a blog):

• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
• Post a scoop.
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger's opinion.
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, "10 things I hate about...", and "You know you're a when..."
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you're blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)

As you can probably tell, building links is both art and science. It requires a great set of tools and tactics, as well as loads of creative ideas.

One might even go so far as to valuate a site, such as a blog, on its links. If you have a blog, for fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, my blog is worth over $40,000. Not bad for some random musings posted on an irregular basis! ;-)

From an search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines.

Most blogs don't have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don't have optimal title tags!) The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. But unfortunately most blogs lead with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end.

We just did some optimization to BusinessBlogConsulting.com and I'm happy to say that's now the case there: the blog name is at the end.

In addition, it's good to customize the title tag of your home page to have some good keywords in them. For BusinessBlogConsulting.com that meant including phrases like "corporate blogs" and "business blogging" and including both singular and plural forms "blog" and "blogs", as well as the verb tense "blogging". (The old title tag was "Business Blog Consulting". Now it's "Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging")

Creating a custom title tag for your blog's home page is well worth doing. Consider this: on this blog I decided to target the search phrase "web marketing blog". By simply changing the home page title tag from "Stephan Spencer's Scatterings" to "Stephan Spencer's Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog" and adding a mention of "web marketing blog" once in the body copy, I went from nowhere for "web marketing blog" in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000!

That's an important point, by the way: Make sure the keywords you are targeting aren't just in the title tag but also in the body copy as well. Otherwise it's not reinforcing your keyword focus to the search engines sufficiently. On BusinessBlogConsulting.com we just added "corporate blogs" to the home page title and body copy. Hopefully I'll be able to report back soon that BusinessBlogConsulting.com is highly ranked for "corporate blogs"!

UPDATE: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is now on page 2 in Google for "corporate blogs". Not bad for a couple minutes of effort!

SEO-Links is one of my favorite Firefox extensions. I use it all the time to gauge how successful and how SEO-savvy a particular link advertiser is.

In this, my second screencast, in all of about 4 minutes, I show you how to install and use this handy plug-in (umm, I mean, extension). Once SEO-Links is successfully installed, I jump to the Seacoastonline.com home page, which is selling links over in the right column mid-way down the page, and with simply hovering my cursor over one of the text link ads, I can see how many links the advertiser has garnered to that page and how highly ranked they are for the search phrase that was targeted by their anchor text. This gives me an indication as to how good that advertiser is at SEO. My assumption is that an SEO-savvy and successful text link advertiser will make better advertising decisions than a failing one. If a bunch of successful ones flock to a particular site selling text link ads, then I'd come to the conclusion that it's probably a good site to advertise on (assuming other things check out like the advertisers aren't using spam tactics).

This screencast is an intermediate level SEO tip.

Download the screencast as either a 2 megabyte WMV file or a 5 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)

MarketingProfs sent out their enewsletter yesterday announcing their annual "Best of" list. I was proud as can be to see my article "The Secrets of Building Links and Increasing PageRank" listed as one of the seven articles bestowed that honor. Hurray!