It never fails to amuse me to receive link request emails from different website owners using the same exact languange. These are the template-driven automated link requests where some unfortunate soul who do not know how to configure the templates end up sending emails like “Dear [insert website name here].”

There is an excellent post at WebmasterWorld.com that looks at how link development should be done. First off, the poster opines that link development should be viewed as traffic development, and not merely as a race to improve pagerank senselessly. Search engines have caught up with the game, and for link building to work the online webmaster should:

1. Instead of sending hundreds of automated emails randomly to other websites, find out websites that are related to your topic and highlight to them what additional info or resource your site can bring to them (instead of the usual blah-blah about improving page rank, etc.)

2. When buying links, buy links because of the traffic it can give you and not because of the pagerank improvement it can bring you (afterall, how long can you keep paying the site to make sure your pagerank remains high?)

3. Instead of writing articles and sending them out to 50 article directories, submit only relevant articles to chosen list of publications (my personal favorite – I am oftentimes convinced that people do not know how to read even though they profess that they are “authors”)

There are more great points in the post. Check it out at WebmasterWorld