Think I'm ready to do some link building. Couple questions.

[astahl11]

Getting ready to do some link building.

I've got several lists of competitors' links, including a bunch of sites with broken links that would be a great fit to link to us.

I've got a capable VA to get started work on reaching out to people.

Just curious if this is the right game plan, seems a little simple:

For this round of link building I'm thinking all the links would point to my root domain.

-Find quality sites/links to go after

-Find an email to the owner/webmaster

-Have the VA send them a value proposition email(i.e. why it's good fit for all)...or tell them about broken links etc.

-Follow up myself when a response is generated.

-Hope/verify they link to us.

Thanks for the help with the newbie questions.

[William.Lau]

Congrats on starting your link building strategy. It seems great and you should keep in mind not to create to many same anchor texts or not natural type of anchor texts or links. We can see that this seems to be a problem in a larger scale with penguin updates.

[rmontanez]

I agree with willny. You might want to take a look at Ontolo.com and buzzstream.com.  I used them for my link building strategies.  Make sure you personalize your emails and provide them value.

[EGOL]

Why should they link to YOU?

[astahl11]

That's always the question right?:) In my opinion the site has very high quality data.

-If they would link to Wikipedia about an article on Neurosurgery then they should link to our interview with a neurosurgeon.  www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-a-neurosurgeon

-It's real information from real people doing the jobs, i.e not a journalist's rendition.

-It should be of benefit to their readers.  If I was reading their site and followed a link on to mine I would say 'hey man, thanks for linking to that.  That was cool, I'll come back to your site more if you keep linking to great info like that'.

Obviously I'm biased though:).

Is that enough?  Or do I need a lot more?

[EGOL]

That sounds great and will help you target potential webmasters.

[astahl11]

Great, much thanks for the help!

[astahl11]

Thanks Willny, was planning on just trying to get links to the homepage and let the Webmaster put whatever anchor text they wanted.

Is that a bad idea?  Or should I specify what anchor text I want?  I figured 'natural' was not suggesting anything.

[astahl11]

Thanks Roberto,

I'll check into those, was planning on just using excel.  Those tools may be well worth it though.

[William.Lau]

Sorry for the late response, still getting use to the Q&A and didn't know how to view the questions I had answered.

I would suggest anchor texts that are natural but nothing too unrelative. Links like www.example.com as the anchor text will still be better than "click here".

As long as its not being spammed too much, it would be fine to request a certain anchor text, but nothing obsessive, try to keep it even.