You can’t ask for specific link text and expect folks to respond positively.
When you ask for an edit to link text the best case is that you’re being a pest. Most editors and bloggers are constantly busy, and they don’t appreciate someone pestering them to go back to an article they wrote three weeks ago just to change the anchor text of a link.
At worst, you’re tipping your hand to someone who thinks there’s money to be made in link selling. One of my team found a blogger who’d linked to a client site and contacted her, asking if she’d change the link. The blogger immediately took the link down and demanded money to put it back up with the correct link text.
Instead, do what you can to make sure you get the right link text from the get-go.
- Put the phrase you want in the link in your article title. That’s often what folks use as anchor text. Keyword-rich title means you’ll have keyword-rich link text.
- Provide an easy way to link back to a particular page: A text box with ‘Link to this article:’ in the box, and a javascript to select and copy the text, is a great way to do it. Include your ideal link in the box and you’ve just increased the likelihood you’ll get the link you want.
- Include keyword-rich ALT attributes for your images. If someone ‘hot links’ the image – if they simply copy the HTML code that places the image on your site and then paste it to their site – they’ll copy the ALT attribute, too.
Take these steps and you’ll get more links than if you’d gone around asking.