Ask the SEO Guru

Law#13 of the 48 Laws of Power

When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude.

I have never fully subscribed to this entirely mercenary philosophy. I do believe in the basic goodness of mankind and I also believe people do things for others out of gratitude and mercy. But, if like me you consider yourself human, then like us all, you have an ego. You crave validation as do we all. This is the underlying emotional reality that makes law #13 my favorite when it comes to link requests.

We’ve all seen the emails,(thousands of them),telling us some site has linked to us and if we’ll link back blah, blah, blah. A classic example of trying to appeal to my gratitude.  Using this approach, you can expect a 1% success rate on a consistent basis.

Or the one explaining how search engines rank websites and exchanging links will help us both. Again, the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours is not appealing to THEIR self-interest, it is appealing to yours and simply a variation of appealing to their gratitude. 1% is yours!

Of course there is the time factor and there are times when a 1% makes sense when comparing time/cost to ROI. But there are those links that represent a value of 1000 to 1 and often one link from the right source can move a money term right to the top virtually overnight. Those types of links are worth investing in.

The technique I’m about to reveal is one that I have used for some time although sparingly due to the time and cost factor. BUT I’ve always felt it was kind of a secret weapon and was hesitant to discuss it openly.

However, this past two months I’ve had occasion to discuss a variation of the technique with a client and then a question came up at SEO Community Forums,(the premier SEO forum online in my opinion), which I decided to answer privately as a way to try to contribute to the community and pay it forward for such a great resource.

So, feeling the cat’s out of the bag so to speak AND accepting that smart/good SEO’s have already thought of it or soon will and the dumb ones won’t get it anyway, here it
goes.

 
Question for the Week of July 17th, 2008

 Originally Posted by XXX XXXX XXXXXX

Understanding The Trick

and What Makes it Work for You, Them and the Web

What’s the Trick? The trick is ---- there is no trick.

If you attempt to use this technique as a fast, easy way to get authority links, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of work with greatly reduced returns. If you automate the process, (which I’m pretty sure some of you will thereby diminishing the value to us all.), you will insult the intelligence of your target, you will soil your own good name and the image and value of your site. Of course if there is a potential increase from 1% to 1.001% then I expect the old “if one is good then 10 million must be better” philosophy to apply. Such is the way of the web.

BUT, if you use this technique to secure linking relationships and valuable, industry-specific content for your site and your visitors, you get the links from industry thought leaders, you provide hi-quality content for your visitors, you make Google look good by placing your content in front of their visitors and you contribute to the overall quality of the web.

Choose people to interview whom you genuinely respect. People who you actually know something about because you have engaged yourself in their content.

Ask questions that give them the opportunity to express their views on issues that are important to the industry and to your visitors.

Be honest and tell them what you will do and then DO IT!

The Basic Technique
Just a suggestion      

Build a page, (sub domains can work very well too), named Press or in the News of similar and link to it from the index page.

On this page provide links to:

News stories about you or your site, (by far the most impressive)

Press releases (also strong for trust builders)

 Industry related stories

Blog comments about you or your site

LIST OF PROMINENT FIGURES IN THE INDUSTRY YOU HAVE INTERVIEWD

(or plan to but haven’t got to it yet.)

On each of the Interviewee pages, use your sites’ logos, headers, sidebars, etc but display their name and a short bio of them
 

Hints and Tips

When building these pages pay attention to your anchor text.

Do the same when asking the questions in the interview  

Do the Research to locate your targets.

Become familiar with them, their site and what others have said about them so you can use that in your bio and in your introduction email. Positive or negative comments about them from other people are good for openers.

EXAMPLE:

John Dow of bigmouth.com said in his blog, (provide link here), that you have never given proper credit to your employees. How do you respond to that?

Include links to their site where appropriate and make sure they get clicked so they show up in their referrers 

When you get an interview completed, place it on the page you already have set up for that person making sure to end with a thank you and a link to their site. Make sure the links get clicked.

Promote the site like you would any other page or target you cared about. Blog about it. Rss it. Social tag it. Create videos where appropriate. Get links to it so it starts placing, etc. etc. etc.

Remember to NEVER ask for a link in the emails you send but you’ll be amazed at how often the target links to your interview on his site, on his blog and on his profile pages from Myspace, Facebook, Twitter,etc. He will tell his friends, his family, his employees his vendors and his competitors. Why? Because you showed respect and that is validation !

A Couple of Cool Tricks We’ve Discovered 
Aaron Wall of SEObook.com has written another great article about the perception of value. Do yourself a favor and read it if you haven’t already.
http://www.seobook.com/value-perception-and-perception-value