But just sitting back and waiting for them to happen by accident isn’t a meaningful action plan. One potentially fruitful approach is to find relevant websites and send them an email asking them to link to you.

Most website owners with any degree of visibility on the web get link request emails. Most often these are poorly written and come from off-shore mass link builders. They’re pretty easy to identify and most people just delete them as spam. That’s one reason that at Rank Magic we follow up email link requests with a phone call (almost no one else does that!).

According to Website Magazine,

Direct link requests get a bad wrap as they are used (and often used poorly) by those that either don’t care or don’t know any better (believing inbound link volume outweighs inbound link quality – which it doesn’t). It should not have to be said but know that email link requests do not typically work when they are misdirected or provide no immediate or long term benefit to those providing the link.

But there are things you can do to increase the positive response to your link request emails.

Follow a few simple suggestions from this Website Magazine article and you should see your email link request success rate improve.