This article is an introduction to an old yet effective link building strategy. It’s called the Suggest a Link Campaign. It is a link building 101 strategy that can form the basis of a long term link strategy.
The suggest a link method can be as simple as telling others about your site. In my experience, it’s an effective way to build links and rank a site. Suggest a Link is easy for beginners to understand.
What is Suggest a Link?
Suggest a Link link building is a way to create inbound links for a website by asking for a link. Some people call it Link Begging. But it can be so much more than begging once you learn how to increase conversion rates.
Suggest a Link link building consists of finding websites that link to pages like yours and asking the publishers to link to your page. This type of link building works best with websites that have a resources or links pages.
A resources or links page is a page dedicated to linking to sites that are useful. To earn a link, one must suggest a relevant and useful web page.
Relevance is Important for Link Building
If you want to obtain a link, you must suggest a relevant web page. That means taking the time to review each link that is listed on the Links or Resources page from which you want to get a link from.
The word exclusive means restricted or limited, that something is being excluded. If the links page exclusively links to educational or government pages, then skip it, don’t waste your time asking for a link. They are excluding all sites from that page educational or government pages.
If your site is commercial, the ideal links page is one that links to other commercial web pages, even if it’s just a single one. Very important, visit that commercial link and try to identify why that page is linked to. Is the link to a specific product? Is the link to an informational article?
If link is to an article then you may have a higher success rate asking for a link to an article that the publishers may find useful.
You can add a link to your product page from within the article, which could be considered the next best thing to a direct link to the product page. But it’s not as useful as a link straight to your products page.
If your site is commercial, obtaining natural links to a specific product is the ideal. But it’s difficult because many sites don’t always link directly to products.
So set your expectations accordingly. Obtaining links takes a lot of effort.
Tips for Suggest a Link Success
1. Review the pages being linked to and suggest a similarly useful web page.
2. Suggest more than just your page. Suggest other pages, too. Read: 1 Link Building Tip Will Increase Success Rate
3. Ask for links from sites whose readers will find your site useful
4. If they don’t already exist, create pages that are useful to the site you want a link from
5. Don’t worry about metrics such as Domain Authority. As long as it’s a not a spam site and it’s relevant then the link is fine.
6. Don’t worry if the link is redirected or no-followed. A link is still useful if it gets the word out that you have a useful website.
Can the Suggest a Link method help your rankings?
In my experience building links for myself and for clients, yes.
But I would advise that you don’t get hung up on whether a link will help you rank or not. The ranking effect on Google is not the goal. Becoming a destination that users expect to see is the ultimate goal.
Spreading the word about your site helps you become a destination that users seek out. Once enough people are aware of your site then the signals of popularity and usefulness that Google looks for will happen by themselves.
The Suggest a Link method is about creating a useful website and telling others about it. It’s a straightforward link building strategy, there’s nothing space cadet about it.
