304 Link Building Opportunities

Let the Link Building Begin!

Your new website just went live so you’re now enjoying the fruits of your labor and admiring the exceptional job you and your team did on design and development. The project is finally over and it is time to settle back and wait for your website traffic to climb to new heights.

Reality check! I repeat – it is time for a reality check. You’re about half done with your quest for internet dominance. The research, website design, build out, and on-page SEO are all only part of your ongoing battle for visitors and conversions. Link building is not only necessary – it’s critical! It is the only way to maximize your website traffic and get the most ROI out of your web design project.

Why Do We Need to Worry About Link Building?

Consider the internet like the homecoming queen contest. To win the crown (or page one ranking), you need to be pretty, have some depth, and have a lot of votes by your peers. A website is no different. It needs to be functional, have unique content, and it needs to have links pointing to it from other websites so Google and Bing know it is of value. The links represent votes and these votes help provide a method by which the search engines and their algorithms can score authority. Without incoming links, it will be impossible to win over the search engines. We SEOs call this off-page SEO.

Why Do We Wait for Link Building Until After Go-Live?

In an early blog post, titled Ten Steps to Quality Link Building and Strong Organic SEO, I discuss the need for a structured link building plan and map of your keyword to page strategy. This is critical because you need to build links into your home page, but also pages and posts. If you’ve followed my website design plan (my previous blog posts), each page of your website will have a specific keyword focus. You’ll need this list and the final page URLs before you can start link building and this list isn’t finalized until after go-live.

How on Earth Can We Find Linking Building Opportunities?

There are a lot of ways, although not all links are as beneficial as others. We SEOs talk a lot about “do follow” links and page authority and PR rank. Most regular people don’t get our SEO babble and they don’t need to get it. What they need is basic link building and a decent list of link building opportunities.

Link building opportunities include, but are not limited to the following:

You’re probably feeling a little overwhelmed right now, but you don’t need to be. Link building is not so much difficult, as it is time consuming. When I first started link building, I spent hours every Friday working on this task. It was painful. Back then there were not a ton of helpful bloggers or SEO consultants giving out free advice. I had to research opportunities and find potential links by turning myself into Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew surfed the internet for websites related to our keywords, watched our competition, and did a whole lot of random queries.

These days link building is much easier. There are lots and lots of sources of information and lists of link building opportunities for generic and/or industry specific links. Liking you as much as I do, I’m going to give you a jump-start and provide a slew of websites to get you started.

Link Building 101

Don’t forget about the anchor text when link building.  Anchor text is the text used to identify the link.  You don’t want to use “click here” because it isn’t descriptive for the user or the search engines.  Use words that relate to the destination page and make sure you have a good mix of phrases or terms.

Did I miss any great link building opportunities?  Okay I’m sure I did, because this list can really be endless.  If you have a great link I missed, please leave a comment and tell us about it.

Author’s Note: This blog post was originally posted in 2011. A lot has happened since 2011 and the world of SEO has changed quite a bit. Please realize that many of the above mentioned tactics were of value at the original publish date, but would not be recommended today. We are leaving the post live for historial reference only.