I'm starting to pull my hair out with this now. The problem I have is that I'm working in an incredibly competive area where 99% of other sites who share my theme are direct competitors! This is what I am doing: - Directory Submissions (about 250) when the site first goes live - As many articles as I can churn out or recycle - Some paid advertising text link advertising on industry related magazine sites What I CAN'T seem to do is get the golden links of high relavancy, nicely surrounded by coherent text on good websites. I search on Google for link builders and link devlopment doesn't instill me with enthusiasm. Half of them don't know what they are on about, and the others want £250 for putting me in directories, which I'm getting done for about $25 a time. How do you find those golden links outside of the directories and articles. Do you pay for them and how much? Ideas please, before I hand myself
This is indeed the holy grail of linkbuilding and you sometimes need to think outside the box a bit. Don't forget you know your sites and niche better than any linkbuilder. When google analyses a webpage they take into account such a huge number of factors that a lot of pages can be related to your theme without you even knowing it. Clearly you won't get links from your direct competitors but you should try to find other sites that are well respected but not currently targeting your niche. Say you have a site selling cheese, you won't get links on other cheese retailers sites and you already have links on all the cheese magazine and discussion websites. Try contacting a site selling biscuits and do a 'page exchange' - you write a page for their site about cheese and they write a page for your site about biscuits. Suddenly you have a well respected site linking to you and it benefits both sites. Alternatively make your site really useful within your niche. Once I did a site selling golf equipment. I made a useful directory of golf courses and lots of golf related sites linked to the golf course directory which gave me lots of relevant links without me asking for them. The links weren't related to golf equipment but they were related to golf.