One of the most difficult aspects of link building is finding and contacting a person who a) knows what a link is and b) can help get your link posted. Oftentimes, just finding any contact email address on a website can be a daunting task, but here are a few tricks that may help you get in touch with the right person.
Almost always, you’ll by trying to find the webmaster, the person with the ability to make changes to the website. Step one to locating a webmaster email address is to check the ‘Contact Us’ page, which often has a link in the main navigation bar of a site. On rare occasions, sites–usually larger ones with numerous departments–will list email addresses for their webmaster or for people involved with the website. Contacting someone in this group, even if they aren’t the webmaster, is a good place to start.
However, it is more often the case that a webmaster is not listed on this page, so you’ll have to do some investigative work. A good place to begin is by typing ‘webmaster’ and then the URL in the Google search box (i.e.: webmaster www.google.com). Look at the cached pages and find the highlighted ‘webmaster’ words. The term webmaster is rarely mentioned on websites unless it’s in reference to contacting them. If this search is unsuccessful, you can try substituting ‘webmaster’ for ‘contact’.
One of the most daunting things a link builder will ever come across is the Contact Form. Contact forms almost always go to sales representatives who couldn’t care less about your link building efforts, and only in rare instances will a link request via contact form be successful. At this point it’s time to pick up the phone and actually speak to a human being (a prospect that may be dreadful to the cave or cubicle-bound link builder). However, you have much better odds calling the phone number and asking to speak with the webmaster than you do with a contact form. The trick is to be pleasant and provide a legitimate reason for contacting the webmaster (an issue or error on the website, for example).
For more information on what to do once you’ve found the correct email address, check out this previous post on link building emails.
Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly Digital Marketing, a Baltimore, MD digital marketing company.
