Lets be brutally honest, long gone are the days when you could get a link to your site with a simple ‘phone call or email request. If you still harbour the idea that link building is a matter of pestering enough people with a request here’s a précis of the current situation for you.

Links are a “vote” for your site. While this analogy is hackneyed, it is bang on. Lets also make the contentious assumption that the SERPs are a democratic meritocracy- a page that ranks may have worthwhile pages linking to it, and its content is truly relevant.

In a democracy you can canvas for a vote, go door-stepping, get a loud hailer, put up posters etc. etc. This is the same as emailing people and ‘phoning them in the attempt to get a link. It may work, but for the effort the return is pretty crumby.

You could also bribe people, pay them for that vote. If you get caught there can be hell to pay, and it can take time for a political career to recover. A similar scenario exists if you buy links, in enough quantity for long enough. A couple of complaints to Google about you and your site could get a penalty. (Also, bought links tend to have a timescale- no money, no linky).

You can get links from directories, from content marketing, from making free download widgets that contain a link back to you etc. You can get links from having pages that offer brilliant advice, by giving something USEFUL away, by starting a movement of some sort, by tapping into the zeitgeist of a particular audience etc.

Getting those links isn’t the point of this post- its what you do with the ones you’ve already got that’s on the agenda here- the low hanging fruit if you like.

A good place to start is Yahoo! Site Explorer, add your domain URL and explore it:

…then click the InLinks button, and select the “Show InLinks: Except from the domain” option:

There should now be a page populated with all your inbound links, and hopefully quite a few “Next” page options too. You can choose to extract that data as a TSV/txt file to import into XL and review locally, or you can click through to the link page to find your link.

It is the activity of finding the link to you from that page that will define what you do next. Depending on the anchor text being used you could leave it as it is (if it’s a useful keyword) or you could contact the site and ask it to be amended somehow (if the link uses an irrelevant keyword, or a URL).

Don’t go asking for any amendments empty-handed though, think of something that you could do in return for this favour- it could be the key to getting what you want. There are plenty of places where you’ll have no influence over anchor text, such as comments on posts, but you can learn to spot these quite quickly.

This activity is a long-term one, and you should go after amending links from authority sites first, as these will give the most benefit. Like almost everything else in SEO this isn’t a silver bullet, but it is worth doing.