How do you explain?

linking for dummies

[Wired Suzanne]

I find that a lot of small sites of shops have quite a nice PR.
I tried to contact them for linking.

So far, I had three replies:

"Yes I will link to you, but I'm not sure exactly to copy."

Eh, crtl+C ....

"a link should lead directly to a widgets page on your site in order to produce sales. It leads just to your homepage instead."

That's up to me right? If I want my homepage to rank high...

"I'm not sure what this email is all about."

Never mind.. sigh..

@#$%*! How do you explain? Or do you just give up?

[AAnnAArchy]

Write to them s-l-o-w-l-y, as if you were explaining it to your parents. Be polite and give them exact instructions on how to do things. Seriously, lots of people just don't understand. I run a site that tends to get lots of newbies. It's frustrating, lots of them are annoying know-it-alls who know *nothing*, but there are lots of good people out there who need a lot of handholding. If you want their links, walk them through it step by step. Sometimes they're so grateful that they want you to redesign their site if you give them the tiniest bit of valuable info, but that's a problem for another day.

Teach them how to copy & paste, if necessary. It took me five tries and three years to get my dad to finally do it, but now he can copy & paste with the best of them. Although, that example may be a bit extreme, as he doesn't make websites. Then again, I've run into some webmasters who aren't much more advanced than my 78 year old dad. Some of them may be someone else's 78 year old dad...or mom.

If the link is valuable enough, be patient with them.

[Wired Suzanne]

Progress, definitely progress...

Your suggestion to swap links makes sense. The only problem is I don't have a clue of how to put your link on my web site.

[mack]

I has the same problem trying to explain to a client why they need to get links pointing to their site.

I once emailed a client to inform them I had secured a nice link from a PR6 site to their site. You can imagine my surprize when I received this reply...

"For them to link to us, how much do we charge them?"

By this point I was just glad I had already been paid.

"@#$%*! How do you explain? Or do you just give up?" you just tell them....

"It's easy just open msdos and type format:/c"

Mack.

[g1smd]

A couple of times I met a person that wasn't sure how to do the linking stuff, I downloaded the appropriate file from their website, added a few heading tags, maybe added a meta description (or improved it), improved the title tag, added content-type meta tags, tidied the code, validated it, and added the appropriate link as well. I showed them a link to the validator website (so they could see the error list for the old file) then showed them how to upload the new file and re-run the validator link to show that the new file has no errors. I explained what I had done and explained that if they checked on Google that maybe the new improved file would appear a little higher in search engine results in a few weeks time too, then pointed them to the usual forums where these topics are discussed. So, they get one of their pages corrected, validated, and SEOed for free and we get our link. A win-win situation. Only one site has completely refused the 'help'.

[dragonlady7]

good one, g1smd.
just being *nice* will get you far in life.

[eWhisper]

gm1sd, congradulations on that one.

Last time I tried that, I got, "We rent space on a server? Well, we pay for a cable modem, why don't we just buy the server and keep it in the basement?"