Great info guys! I am going to try putting form on homepage on a few sites to see the response rates. Ill let post the data later. Thanks again!

In the past, I have offered a variety of benefits to the sites I am contacting. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

• Relevant and original blogs or articles

• sharing their site or advertisement on social media profile

• writing a testimonial for businesses or individuals that I have worked with

• "how-to" articles

• Infographics or visual guides

• Bringing typos or broken links to webmaster's attention

• A reciprocal link

How important is it to have a contact form on the homepage of a service-based business?

I am trying to decide if having a form on front page will increase the number of people filling it out.

In my experience with sending out link request emails, they always want to know how it benefits them. Whether you are offering content, infographics, guest blog post, broken link corrections, reciprocal link, endorsing them on a social media or providing a testimonial for their business, I have seen the best results by telling them how it will benefit their website.

Create a compelling title that mentions the benefit so you have a higher open rate. Getting them to open is half the battle.

Also, try including your website url in the body of the message so it easy for them to click through and review your site:

"Our pagerank 4 website - http://www.example.com - which carries (Here I said what we carry) You have similar sites located in the "Other" Section on your link page."

Make sure your request is short, clear and direct. Possibly rewording your opening sentence to:

"Would you consider adding our site on the "Links" section list?"

my URL is ________________________

Competitor site is __________________

I thought there might be a way to block some link explorer bots but wasn't sure. Thank you for verifying that.

I was able to find a few more links on Bing's Link Explorer but still no substantial links.

I didn't think on-page optimization would put you above a site with decent on-page optimization and a better link profile - but maybe it does.

They don't have any social profiles so social signals can't be a contributor to their high ranking.

I tried some other site explorers. There were a couple links that were shown on Majestic but not on OSE. None of the linkbacks seemed to be of any quality.

I dedicate one of my browsers for checking rankings and I never sign in, so it should be a pretty accurate SERP.

The content has remained the same since I have been tracking them. The only difference with their content and other competing sites is they have the exact-match keyword listed multiple times throughout the site. However, it looks and reads very unnatural.

I have been following a competitor's link profile on OSE for over 8 months. Their linkbacks have remained the same (3 follow, 9 nofollow links), all from low-quality directory sites. However, my competitor continues to improve in rankings  and is now #1 for competitive keyword searches.

How is this possible? Is there a way to hide your link profile or links from OSE?

Any tips are appreciated - Thanks!