You are probably aware that the best type of links you can get are those from authority sites. These are sites that have a high PageRank and a lot of links to them. Usually they are information sites that help people in your industry. Obtaining a link from these sites is like gold and will really help your rankings. However the biggest problem is that links from these sites are notoriously difficult to get and so you may be disappointed. You should always make sure you ask the webmasters of these sites to link to you but if they say no you need to adapt your strategy.
Second Tier Sites
If you do have difficulty getting links from authority sites then you can change tactics. The best thing to do is look at all the sites that the authority site links to. You will then need to check each of them out and contact them in order to request them to link to you.
This can be a really successful strategy as you will get some influence from the authority site if you get links from the sites it links to. Obviously these links will not have the same value as those from the authority sites but they will still be important and so should not be ignored.
Link Value
All links have different value and the in some ways a good way to tell is by checking the PageRank of a site that you are requesting a link from. The higher the PageRank the more important the link is. This seems strange because surely a link is a link but this is not the case.
When Google counts your links it also gives an importance to your links and the more important links you have the higher you will appear in the search results.
Anchor Text
Obviously when you are requesting links from both authority and second tier sites it is important to request anchor text that includes your keywords. This is absolutely vital to appearing at the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords. The more links you have that contain your keywords the more chance you have of appearing high up. In addition to that if your anchor text is used on authority or second tier sites that are relevant to you it will have even more importance and really help your campaign.
Conclusion
Many people will request links from authority sites and if they get rejected they will just move on and try something else. If you adopt the strategy discussed in this article you will not just be losing an authority site that said no. It is always important with any SEO campaign that you are flexible and able to adapt as things change if you do this then your chance of being successful is far greater. You could be surprised that if you get a lot of links from second tier sites that your ranking will increase far more quickly than you would have expected and this can only benefit your site and your business in the long run.
