I'm in a highly competitive national market where the top sites have links from between 325 and 1300 unique linking root domains, therefore, you have to have an aggressive approach just to get on the map. (I'm at 317) If we were talking about needing 50 good links, I could take the time to cultivate relationships, get to know people, and get 1 or 2 great links from each webmaster, but the scale of the challenge is out of control. My competitors, and myself, seem to all be getting links in the following ways:
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Hoards of directory links. Some high quality paid links from industry sites ($2,400 per each link per year) and hundreds from 9-$49 per year.
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At the bottom of the list of most all my competitors, there appears to be some links from their early beginnings that were reciprocal linking arrangements.
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Blogs where they submitted articles and have good links back to their sites.
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Paid ads on sites all over the internet that link back with their specific key words. Some from relevant sites, but mostly from sites that would give them a good deal and have high enough traffic and/or page rank.
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Blog comments with a link back to their site; sometimes with good anchor text and sometimes you're forced to have to use your web site address as the anchor text or even your name. (Does that even do any good?)
My dilema is where to find 1,000 good places to get links and I don't do black hat? I can write good quality comments on blogs from a wide variety of industries, but most are now eliminating the possibility of using my anchor text other than my web site and my name. As I scour the playing field, it almost appears that it has become a "pay to play" proposition as far as getting links everywhere other than writing good blog articles, but then what good does it do to have 500 blog articles coming from a handful of linking root domains? You're just stuffing the ballot box!
As for me, I'm in the teens with all the high value phrases I need and must come up with a better strategy for the home stretch. In all the other varied statistical measurements that I see on SEO Moz, I'm no lower than #5 out of the top 10 competitors in any of them except Alexa rank. So, I'm close but it seems so far away! Would appreciative and be grateful for some wisdom from the community! Lowell
