Get links from lists of resources and online directories.

Getting links to your site from reputable resource sites, which are often comprised of lists of resources for a given search term or topic, is quite useful. Not only does it refer users to your website, but it will also improve the authority of your website. The more relevant the website that links to you is to your industry the better. If you are an expert on something consider becoming an editor at Wikipedia, this is a “no follow” resource but the biggest search engines still like to see your website listed as a resource on a topic in Wikipedia.

Just find a topic that interests you. Write an article about it and publish it on your website; at this point you can cite that page from Wikipedia. Other large resources like Quora.com are also easy places to get links from, especially if you are an expert and start answering people’s questions (there is nothing wrong with directing them to a page on your site. Just make sure you follow the directions and find the right category as an actual human will review your submission and if anything is off you will likely not be added.

To put this into perspective, imagine you need to find a good mechanic around town. You can search for “best mechanics in New York” and pull up an article or site with a page titled “Top 15 mechanics in NY.” You then scroll through that list until you find a mechanic near you, then visit their site to find more information. This is exactly what you want to achieve in being added to a resource list. Even if these pages don’t send a ton of traffic to your site, you’ll still increase your website’s authority because you also got a backlink from that page. Quality backlinks are always good for SEO.

Finding a resource page to submit your website to can be a bit tricky, the wrong approach is to blindly send lots of requests to 100s of websites. The correct way to go about resource page links is to find lists that are currently ranking for industry terms, updated, and appear useful. This may take a little bit of tracking, but it’ll pay off in the long run, as your site will have a better chance of being clicked on sites such of these. Remember too, it is easy to see all your competitors’ backlinks!

Steps to complete this task

Find good websites to get links from. The easiest way to do this is check your competitors’ links (using premium tools like Spyfu or MOZ, or even just searching for “free backlink tool”). Any of these tools will pull up a list of all the websites that link to a given competitor.

Once you’ve found a page you feel is well suited for your site link, you’ll need to make a pitch. Remember, 80% of these will probably not link to you but if you analyze the top 10 competitors in your space and go after all the websites linking to them, you will end up with enough backlinks to rank with any of the top players.

For larger or well-known sites, you may need to do some research and find out who’s in charge of the website. You can usually find this on a staff page or on LinkedIn. Once you find their contact info, go ahead and send off your request. Be creative and ponder why a particular website linked to one of your competitors. Were they reviewing a competitors product. Ask the website to review yours as well. Did the website post some of their content or a blog post. Ask them to do the same for you.

You should always follow up on your pitches/requests. Check the page one last time before contacting, but if you don’t see your site link on the page, contact the one in charge again with a follow up. Whatever you do don’t offer to trade a link from your website to theirs. This is called reciprocal linking and will get you penalized on all the major search engines.

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