Link Building

Search engines do not rank a page only on what the page says. They also weigh how much the rest of the web vouches for it. That is why a site can polish its own writing for months and stay exactly where it was.

Pagedeck once spent three months and twenty posts going after the phrase "meeting notes," and never moved off the second page of results. The posts on page one were shorter than Pagedeck's. The only real difference was that those sites had dozens of links pointing at them from industry publications and blogs. No amount of additional writing closes that gap, so earning links became a separate piece of planned work.

There are five steps.

1. Pick one or two pages to collect links for. Spreading the effort evenly across a site produces nothing visible; concentrating it on the page you want to rank does.
2. Build a list of people to contact. Find the blogs and publications that cover your subject, and put the ones with the highest domain authority first — that is a 0-to-100 estimate of how much trust a whole domain has accumulated.
3. Decide what you are offering. An email that only asks for a link usually goes unanswered. Offer your page as a replacement for a dead link in someone's article, ask the sites that mentioned you without linking, or write something for the publication yourself through guest posting.
4. Send the emails and log the replies. Mail a hundred places, earn three links, and that is a reasonable round.
5. Check what you got. Confirm the link actually went up, and look at the words it is attached to. A link that reads "here" and a link that reads "automatic meeting notes tool" are not the same single link.

Buying links is faster and stays off the table. If a search engine judges it as manipulation, the whole site drops down the results. Run the work honestly and a round takes two or three months.

"This quarter's link building all goes to the pricing comparison page."

The plan is to concentrate on one page instead of scattering the effort.

"Eighty emails out, two links back. I think the material was weak."

The reply rate says the thing being offered needs rebuilding, not the way it was asked for.

"We don't buy links. If it gets caught the whole site drops."

Blocking a proposal to use one of the vendors selling links at about $25 each.

Ravi runs one round a quarter at Pagedeck. He fixes the target page, narrows the contact list to around forty places, and works the replies from there. In quarters where the team has something worth citing — a survey it ran itself, for instance — the reply rate climbs noticeably.