How to do link search for link prospecting – WordPress and Blogging tips

What is Link Search?

Link search (or link prospecting) is one of the critical and first initiatives in the link acquisition process. Every link building tactic always start with finding links in a particular web place using free SEO tools and sorting those links in a spreadsheet based on the brand’s link standards.

When conducting link search evaluate the link targets to see if they’re suitable to develop links around on. Next you need to see if you need to tweak your content development to identify the kind of content people are always linking out to.

How to find new link targets

There are three things to know and be aware of when building links.

Relevance. Look at the relrevance at both domain level and also for the page. Think of a fitness page getting a link from a page talking about dumbbells.
Authority and trust. Does the site receive organic traffic from search?
Use either SEMrush or Ahrefs.
The link target should match metrics like PR or DA and from the linking apge.
Why would someone link to your page from their site.
How easy it is going to be to scale the link prospecting campaign?

Tools for Link Prospecting

In the next section I’m going to discuss all the different tools you can use to start acquiring new links to your site.

1. Linkbuildr

Linkbuildr is a good outreach tool. It promotes content on websites and blogs you mentioned in the article.

The tool scrapes an entire post or page to see if there are external links or references in the article. It will give you a list of those sites and you can send personalized emails. This is all possible from inside WordPress.

2. Citation Labs Link Prospector

Citation Labs prospector is your tool of choice for large scale prospecting. If you’re an agency working with different campaigns, the tool is for you.

With the tool scrape page results for the keywords you want to target. Insert the search phrase. You can also add advanced search operators. Choose the link opportunity you want, say sponsors, blogs or links to resource pages.

The citation labs prospector will give you a number of link opportunities.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the best tool for link discovery

There are several things Ahrefs can help with for your campaign:

With Ahrefs yuo can set up a filter that shows pages that are broken but have links pointing at them.
Find pages that have similar content like the pages they’re linking out and then reach out to them.

HARO

Another great source of links is HARO. They’re looking for real people to contribute to their stories.

If you can provide them with suitable content then you get mentions in return as a result of your efforts.

Help a reporter out is great tool to find journalists or inquiries looking into input on several different topics.

HARO is a great resource for you to reach out to relevant publishers and bloggers who want extra input for their content. You get value inreturn as links or mentions.

this tool.

5. AllTop

Alltop has a great search function for you to enter keywords and find sites relevant to these keywords.

When you have a list of sites on the spreadsheet, all you need to do is start reaching out to them to build links. You can get a mention in the future if you have a relationship with them.

As soon as you get websites relevant to your brand you can use their feed on the manage feeds section from Alltop.

You get emails regarding updated content on those sites.

Spend between 4 to 5 minutes to put yourself on their radar through commenting and social outreach.

6. Flickr

Flickr has thousands of images on their site. Type andy keyword and you get hundreds of images that gather thousands upon thousands of views.

When you do reverse image search you can find pages that have those images.

Use ahrefs or other link checking tools to find all the domains linking to those pages.

7. Google Image Search

The Google image search is a splendid tool to find all the images ranking for the key term you’re searching. These images are ranked high because of their alt tags.

Since these images are ranking on the top for particular search items, few bloggers might be using those images on their sites. You can find these bloggers and reach out to them to reclaim links.

In addition, images of your brand (event photos, your CEO’s profile image, brand logo, etc..) would help you find more link opportunities.

8. Similar Site Search

Similar Site Search is a link prospecting tool that helps you find sites that are similar to your own.

You can use more search queries to find link prospects starting from the common search phrase which is the site URL.

For instance shoutmeloud.com is one site.

Shoutmeloud.com marketing. These will give the subset of sites similar to shoutmeloud and related around the keyword marketing.
Shoutmeloud.com +marketing -seo. This gives sites reated to shoutmeloud in marketing but shouldn’t include any seo blogs. This is a great chance to widen the number of marketing sites you want.
Shoutmeloud.com filter language by hindi. This gives a list of sites similar to shoutmeloud but running in the Hindi language.
Shoutmeloud.com filter country by India. This gives a list of similar indian blogs to the site.

Twitter Advanced Search Queries

Twitter isn’t just a social tool to engage with brand customers or even influencers. You can find link building opportunities with the use of Twitter. Just like other search engines, Twitter has a set of advanced search operators to make you search effectively and land guest posting opportunities.

Use “guest post” +” keyword +filter: link to get guest post opportunities through Twitter. This isn’t something you can get with advanced search operators on Google.
To:influencer. With this you can track who’s sending messages to influencers. This helps you identify bloggers linking to an influencer site. Bloggers say in status updates that they mentioned an influencer on their blog.
@mashable – track who’s mentioning an influencer.

Engage with people you found this way. Answer their questions or comment on tweets. Cultivate strong relationships with these users and get more linking opportunities this way.

Weight loss? – the search query about will get you questions with the keywords fitness tips. Answer questions of these users.
since:2010-12-27 “weight loss” – search for conversations that include the keyword, weight loss and get interactions with the users (early dates would be more efficient for engagement than conversations dated from past years or months)

10. Facebook Graph Search

Facebook might not be a great place where you start begging for links the first chance you get. It’s a great place to foster connections with prospects say through cold email outreach. This can get you links and mentions further down.

The graph search is a great option to search pages, groups and people interested in your brand’s offers. Type keyword in niche and city name to search bar and get what you’re looking for.’

11. AllYouCanRead

If the content strategy for your brand is around creating magazines, All you can read can help. You get a list of top magazines in your industry where you can add new content to. If the editor accepts contributions from external editors. That is.

12. Wikipedia

Look for page that discuses a topic in the industry with the search bar. Simply add wikipedia.com your topic to find pages that list the keyword you want to search for.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to check if there are resources or even reference links at the bottom. Visit each resources and track down the links to those pages.

You find great resources from the list. You could find great resources from that list which are mostly authoritative, credible sites and hosted on extensions like .edu and .org.

Linking out to these resources from your content would boost your outreach campaigns. It increase response rates as you reach out to people behind the resource pages.

Find outdated articles in Wikipedia, update them by adding more insights. You can find this content with the query: site:wikipedia.org, this article is outdated plus keyword.

13. Quora

Quora is another place from where you can build referral traffic to your site. This improves personal branding and lets you share your expertise helping you answer questions people have.

A few content publishers would start with the frequently asked questions by people in the same niche as theirs before creating their own content.

You can create a much more useful article with answers and solutions to questions people have as part of using your product.

Answer questions that you could add most amount of value to. Link to blog posts only when necessary and add the same to the discussion.

The more you answer industry relevant questions, the more these people will follow you. Engage with them by sending personal messages on Quora or reach out to them on their blogs through commetns and mailings.

The more you answer industry-related questions, the more industry folks will Search Queries for the List Section of the Site

Bloggers add a list section on the site which is typically a list of resources, a blogroll, a partners section or a sponsors page. These sections consist of external or internal links and are great for link building because it’s where where you have industry pages to place links.

Use the query: blogrolls followed by your keyword to get sites that come with blogroll sections.

You can also use the query partners with or in partnership with plus keyword to see pages that list partners in the industry. This is something you can use to find brands to connect with.

Use the query, donate or sponsor or contribute followed by the keyword to get sites where you can add brand related terms to place your link.

Board Reader

If you use the query inurl: forum + keyword you could find niche specici forums where you could contribute to discussions and egnage with forum users.

With borardreader you can find discussions happenign on forums around your industry. This makes finding forums easy than doing any manual search for forums.

It gives you results on preferences.
Get a visual graph of the activity of the keywords. Track the number of people using the keyword in discussions.
Filter results by languaghe or time period and create a solid list of discussion sites.

People Finder

With the tactic find edu sites in the list. It’s a tool to discover current students of an institute together with ther email ids. It makes outreah much more easy if you send them to individual students rather than to generic email address like contact@college.edu.

If you already have a list of sites do a Google search inurl:edu your country or city to determine whether these sites have a people finder tool.

How can you identify if the site has a people finder tool?

How can you find the student’s email address?

Use this advanced search query: “people finder” site:schoolname.edu to determine if the site has its own people finder tool.

Some tools would reveal affiliations where student belongs and also has a link to personal blog. This shows their affiliation,

17. Industry Survey tools

Create tools for conducting industry level surveys, Doing to will lend insights from target audience regarding topics you want more information on.

The tool is great for content marketing and also for discovering new link targets that you’re not readily targeting with the survey. The tool isn’t just for new targets that you want to find with the survey. Quality link prospects using brand’s link standards starting from relevancy, to influence and so.

The more popular your survey is, the more link targets you can get from it.

\ Local Event Websites

Local events are a link asset for both offline and online events. kNowing you can build new relationships with customers or other rbands during and after a local event, your brand can promote itself through partnerships or collaboraitons.

Both eventbrite and meetup are two sites where you can find events around a locla geograpcy

ur brand. This would open doors for local linking opportunities seeing that the audience that you might connect with either by attending or even hosting the local event could link to your brand/site from their blogs.

Let’s say I’m looking for a local event that will discuss technology, internet marketing or any related topics. And specifically, I want an event that targets students, faculty staff and personalities working in an educational institution.

By simply using Eventribe as my prospecting tool, I was able to visit this page.

Is an event on marketing going to be held somewhere near you? Then this is an opportunity for you to connect with students interested in what you’re doing say online marketing.

If you want to speak at a public event, get in touch with the organizer of the event. Speak about your expertise and tell them where and how you stand out.

Incentivize that person by offering some of your products for a discount.

Footprints

Simple searches for link targets isn’t the best way to find targets. When searching for phrases you’re going to see resource pages if you combine the search as keyword+resources.

This is a chance for you to find all competitors targeting the sites to add their links on them.

Because of that your outreach emails need to be way better than what they’re offering. As your pitch stands out, you stand to get more number of positive responses from people.

Footprints look into pages that your competitors may not always be targeting through their campaigns. With that you stand to gain further than where they stand.

For local links you might be relying on local events + industry to get those sites. You get a number of local events where you can participate for branding or for promotion.

As you go further searching you get a footprint for local event pages.

Comment on social media platforms

Social media platforms are a channel for voicing what people think. They share new experiences about products and services and the brand can build a community from those discussions.

When you search for a keyword on YouTube you get a number of videos relevant to what you searched for. Each video has a large number of commments that you can for link building. This is possible on all videos except ones where uploaders don’t allow comments.

Go to each comment. Visit the YouTube profile. Click on about section and then visit the URL of the user site.

Zemanta

Zemanta can provide you with a number of suggestions for content marketing. It will help you find related relevant blog posts to fuel content creation and also find linking opportunities with Zemanta.

When you go to these content pieces you get if the sites are good for building links from.

Foursquare

Foursquare is another place for you to see where local brands in and around your city are. This is an opportunity for you to partner up with other brands for local events. Share what you feel about the brand with the larger local community and the importance of your brand’s vision.

The best nearby functionality on Foursquare is a good tool to

The Best Nearby functionality on the channel lets you promote the brands outside target industries.

How to search for links to land several opportunities

Link search is a phase in a brand’s link building campaign. The success will often rely on

How obtainable the links are. Links are built contextually, site wide international pages and others.
Quality of content on different blogs

When you search the right way for links you get thousands of link opportunities based on what your competitors may not have even thought of.

Here are 12 link research tactics to use:

1. Discover topical blogs

If your link building efforts rely on building relationships with bloggers, topical blogs are the best bet for you.

Do a Google search for “industry” blog for nuches not directly around your brand but having a big community of bloggers interested in linking to your pages.

You can get quality links from niches relevant to your blog say CRO, marketing, web design, affiliate marketing and so on.

You can also use different search terms to net more link opportunities as you go. There are several niches where people might find your posts to be useful and as such you can contribute on them.

“CRO” OR “conversion rate optimization” intitle:blog
“Web design” intitle:blog OR “blog”
“affiliate marketing” intitle:blog OR “blog”

The relevance of the sites is important here.

2. Use list of lists posts

List posts are pretty popular. Creating a list of lists posts gives you the benefit of targeting a hundred different blogs for building links.

It’s easy searching for them.

Use the queries below

Top 10 “industry”
Top 50 “industry”
Best of “industry”
Ultimate list “industry”

If there are no list posts in the particular industry, create one. You have a list of bloggers and you can send them valuable content to use for your pitch.

3. Leverage brand partners

Brand influencers or partners are another group who you must use for an opportunity to engage with local and niche brands. Since there’s an existing database of partners, there’s a good chance to involve them in the link development campaign.

For small and medium sized companies, these partners are ideal for link acquisition.

Suppliers connected to the brand.
Local non profits with which the brand has engaged in the past.
Local institutes with courses aligned with the brand.

These groups are your list of brand partners. You can earn their trust because of their existing relationships with institutes,

For eCommerce clients, you need not go anywhere to find these partners. Look at the stie find a page where it says list of suppliers, Start prospecting from that point and add potential targets to the spreadsheet.

4. Make use of market-centered keywords

One way to get a list of link prospects to your database is to look at what your target audience looks online at.

If you work for a travel agency, consider phrases for your market.

These are phrases that people are looking for when hunting for resources about travel. These are why and what terms. This is significant to the market needs.

Reverse engineer content contributors

Show how your brand is expert at with the help of blogging. This can drive organic and referral visits to your site. With this approach you can find guest posts by using the terms guest post or writer for us.

With this method you will discover a number of blogs in the niche accepting guest posts. However you cannot be sure that these blogs are of the required quality.

Find the best blogger in the industry and determine their content directors.

blogs where the author had contributed his content to:

“[Name] is a content contributor for [Competitor Domain].com”
“[Name] is the author of”
“[Name] is the blogger at”
“[Name] is the owner of”
[Name] “author” OR “blogger” OR “marketer”

So when targeting 50 or so sites you get the top content managers of these sites with this approach.

Apply footprint prospecting

The next thing you can do is finding competitor footprints and discover low-hanging fruits for link building. If done regularly this is the approach you are doing then you won’t be able to succeed far higher than competitors.

If you’re building your brand from scratch, then you can use footprint prospecting to connect with bloggers using blog commenting.

A search followed by keyword leave c comment will yield a list of blogs where you can search new posts and get insights in the comment section.

You can also look for footprints in new opportunities for the brand.

[competitor] “interview”
[competitor] “news”
[competitor] “press”
[competitor] “author”

Click search tools anytime past month.

Updates in the blog posts with the addition of internal or external links that improve page ranking
Text or video interviews
WEbinars, podcasts or press releases of the brand.
Social profiles of the author or the brand.

7. Utilize customer defining keywords in link search

Customers when searching for products or services use terms or phrases that are built around a target audience and their searches.

Putting your link search in terms of what customers define their groups will help you discover qualified prospects instantly.

Go through glossary pages in your niche and have a look at specific terms that define audience groups.

Here are all the customer-defining keywords to build link data.

web design “blog”
web design “resources”
web design “guide”
web design “links”

Change customer defined keywords to other industry audience groups and get more opportunities.

8. Discover industry thought leaders

Finding who are the leaders in the industry by searching for the names of authors from competitor brands and adding them to advanced search operators for prospect pages or sites where those authors were included.

Industry thought leaders have an overarching presence that goes beyond their brands. They are linked to media, content sites, branded pages, and communities where their presence looms large.

Take hold of brands who have multiple authors and partners attached with them and who will amplify the power of content marketing for you by having a larger audience size and consider the number of followers with each author.

Learn from thought leaders to understand how they build their own personal brands through identifying opportunities creating a great impression for your brand as well.

You can also look into topics each industry leader has covered before. Try investing into content themes that reach out to thought leaders interested in consuming and sharing the content.

Add expert phrases of authors to search strings and get a list of sites where they were mentioned.

9. Maximize product and category keywords

One not so known approach for finding link targets is adding brand’s categories in search strings. This will get you a number of opportunities to target products your brands can sell.

Talk to your clients the types of products they sell or go to their site and look at brand categories.

In our earlier example, you can have these types of products:

Flat feet running shoes
High-arched feet running shoes
Neutral running shoes
Normal running shoes

Add your keywords reviews, forums and blogs to categories. Find pages or websites that you can potentially link to content.

Use local intent keywords

Add search strings and modify them for a local audience and this helps you discover and participate with the local press and get more chances at driving traffic and increase your sales as a result.

Columbine keywords like reviews, resources, blogs and others to find local pages or sites.

Be specific with resource page terms

For getting links from resource pages you need to be extremely creative in pitching them.

You need to understand the industry terms frequently targeted and used on existing links.

You need to fully understand the kind of industry terms webmasters are using in existing links to your site. When running a niche be specific when doing link search to find resource pages.

intitle:resources OR inurl:resources “sleep”
intitle:resources OR inurl:resources “pillows for side sleepers”
intitle:resources OR inurl:resources “insomnia”

THe more specific the search, the better results are you going to get to filter out anything irrelevant.

Check related verticals when hunting for link prospects. This gives you a ton of opportunities for others to discover you.

How to Speed Up Your Link Prospecting Activity

Assets (Internal)
Opportunities (External)

Assets are webpages where you want to build links and get them to rank higher. Opportunities are linking partners or sites to place your link on.

It can be from homepages, from directories, from profile pages, social profiles, partners membership pages, business directories and so on.
It can be through ebooks posted on ebook directories and through product review sites.
It can be through sponsor sites, grants pages and paid product review.
Can be through guest posts and roundups.
Team Members = Interviews, Unlinked Brand Mentions

The more you wrap your head around the assets the more you create linking ops for these assets.

This can further amplify the reach of each of your assets since you’re building a wide array of link building opportunities that are highly obtainable and relevant to your target page.

Keyword-based link prospecting

Ranking pages

This is an easy way to get a list of prospects from prequalified link targets.

Do a search for related websites. Use targeted keywords to run a Google search for related phrases.
Next get a bunch of linking targets from search results with new niche specific terms connected to the queries.
Use synonyms from Thesaurus and other relevant sites. Run these query suggestions to get a list of new targets.

Link building queries

Link building queries are a good thing to limit the number of pages appearing on search results for keywords. Using these link queries is more effective when using advanced search operators.

Building high quality links by paying of sites requires no little budget. However you can always donate a little money to build links to your site.

Use the query inurl: sponsor or donate or grant +finance. This gives you an option to donate between $5 and $50 and get your link on the sites.

Tools to Speed Up Your Link Prospecting Activity

Here are all the tools you need by you to help with link building for your strategy.

Link Clump
Notepad
Ctrl + W
Excel Files

Link prospecting means you need great output while minimizing the number of resources expended like labor, time and tool cost.

16 Advanced Link Prospecting Techniques For Increase Efficiency

Listing down link similarities

Bloggers use in most respects the same terms to create links for pages. A resource page may have domain.com/ resources, Therefore it becomes easy to use queries to find those pages.

resources/links
resource-guide
useful-links
useful-resources
niche-resources
recommended-resources

Not all queries like resources.php or links.html are useful resources relevant to an industry. However it’s useful to narrow down results from inurl:useful-links followed by niche.

inurl:useful-links “niche”. Google will then provide you results based on the keyword you used which is more applicable to your campaign. For instance inurl:useful-resources “marketing”

2. Utilizing country domain extensions

A lot of the domains today don’t end in common addresses. There’s .com.au, .ca and .uk. Using these domain extensions helps you get results from only those places. Use the advanced operator inurl: followed by the country domain extension.

YOu can go even deeper by doing searches for inurl:ca.photography resources. You get a list of photography resources from Canada alone because of that.

Use these techniques in any industry you want where you want to do research around. If you don’t have a single geographic area to focus on then search for link targets that end with.com.

3. Identify company blogs through SERPs

The search engine page results is another place to understand if the link is a website or is a link to a blog. Not all domain names are accurate. However it can sometimes reduce the time it takes for us to manually check the links to see if its a company website or not.

Some examples:

Let us say you search for intitle:guest-post. In this you will get links that have the keywords guest post in the title of the article.

Another punctuation mark to identify the company site is through a hyphen or dash. The domain name is the brand name of the company included in the page title immediately after the hyphen. Other times, you see the em dash or the long dash.

Next is the punctuation colon. The difference from hyphen and a vertical bar is you can notice it at the beginning of the page title.

The brand name is first followed by the colon and then the page title.

We can distinguish company websites through these punctuation marks located at the page title. Just a little note, not all sites that use a hyphen, vertical bar, and colon in the page title are companies. Some content creators tend to do that as well.

Learning by observing what works is the truest path to success when it comes to prospecting for links. Maximize how you use Google search queries and lower the time it takes for you to click through needless links. Domain names and symbols all have deeper meaning. THat’s why you need to be always aware of what’s going on.

Terms that aren’t generally used but you see mentions of in the client industr can be used as keywords for broad search.

4. Website categorization

When conducting a new outreach campaign you should start by hunting down new opportunities on the web. It’s good if it’s a new industry.

With website categorization you have ample help. Use tags to categorize prospects.

You need a hierarchy of topics to start your research. Use the BOTW to start given they talk about deeper level topics which is important for specific niches.

The team must agree on topics to kill confusion.

Check descriptions in links to eye SEO’y content

Backlink research includes identifying both current and existing competitors and pages that are linking to them for opportunities.

SEOs check competitors by running their target terms on Google and see which sites are on the first page. They use this to create a list of competitor websites.

These two ways are the best to find a list of relevant competitors. You can still miss out on SEOyed content if you reverse engineer backlink profiles.

SEO’y content is pages linking out from resource pages you’re doing outreach to and have earned several linking root domains from the past.

This helps enable vertical prospecting from either vertical or horizontal perspective. SEO’y content helps you expand prospecting and helps you find it through Google search.

Look at the discrepancies in the descriptions around links. There are seources pages with full descriptions for each link and there are links with an unusual set of descriptions as well.

If there are fewer descriptions it’s possible that many others are in active pursuit of link building opportunities on those pages. This will help you gain targets who are receptive to those acquisition requests.

The tool gives a list of all external links on the resource page and highlights the number of domains linking to external pages.

With Linkclump open pages simultaneously

With link prospecting, the more time you spend checking links that aren’t worth a dime the more you waste time spent otherwise in acquiring the right links.

They often click on document links that consume minutes and of their time. If your main targets are links from resource pages don’t spend time on these things.

The best approach is to use a tool that unclicks these document links.

Linkclump can be used to filter out words to exclude links when they open in new tabs.

Once you right click and drag external links from the URLOpener the action won’t open document links as new tabs given you excluded certain words from the tools settings.

With the help of niche phrases expand link list

Being familiar with the client’s industry gets you a bunch of phrases to use as titles in resource pages.

The question is in applying this to new niches you’re not familiar with.

How to find niche phrases to expand your prospecting. The best thing to do is collect the titles from the resource pages. You get 80 to 100 links.

Finding more links with better keywords.

Research isn’t enough until you use all the right keywords. It’s not possible to get the right prospects at this stage without the correct strategy. Keyword generation is at the heart of each campaign.

To understand how keyword research can help let’s try and make sense of this in a deeper way. A keyword is a search term people are looking for. We must ensure the phrases we are using to research will map together with phrases our target prospects are using to search for our content.

Another lose translation is password. I like the idea of decoding a password in relation to finding the most effective keywords you can use for link prospecting. Unlike search queries, passwords have a number of possibilities you can use.

You should consider multiple factors when choosing those words. The most common keywords are either generic or specific or even long tail.

Generic Keywords

Generic keywords may both be unspecific and comprising large search volumes. As such you get thousands of competing sites.

Specific Keywords

The keyword is more particular. Say a washing machine. This specific keyword can be attached to a brand say Samsung washing machines.

Long-tail keywords

Long tail keywords are typically much more complex. The best example are keywords with three to four or more words.

A set of four words or more is considered long tail typically.

How to come up with the best combinations for the best results? This ties back to using common sense and being aware of what the opportunities before you are.

Use topic guide to search for content competitors.

Reverse engineering competitor sites is another big way to build links. It’s here to spy on competitors for link sources pointing on their pages.

However, that approach will leave you following the footprints of your competitors.

If you’re visible on sites you haven’t got any links from it’s a much better strategy to get ahead of these sites.

Look at the competitor brands who have published industry guides on similar kind of topics.

The search query “Guide” Topic gives you a list of websites that other industries in SERPs have topically relevant assets on.

For instance if I search for clothes followed by guide here’s what I see on the results page.

Make a list of sites or blogs. The next step is to make a list of people with sites or blogs who have linked to similar industry guides or shared them on social media. It’s easy to get this data with the help of Ahrefs.

List these down on a spreadsheet where you add the prospect’s contact email.

Reach out to them and you get chances of getting links if they’re interested in the subject.

Embracing competitor opportunities

Finding competitor link opportunities is no easy feat. Pages will be displayed on Google SERPs using not all important or relevant factors you’re looking for. Checking sites connected to competitors will give you an idea regarding where from to build links. It will give you a bunch of relevant competitors a set of new ideas and also networks.

Embrace all opportunities that you get for building new set of links.

Keep track of websites with consistent linkable content production

It’s not always you get a brand that publishes content assets that gets a number of high-quality links to the page. If you get a site that matches with this criteria. You should definitely spend time on the site.

Try and spy while getting hold of its content creation and promotion strategy.

In all broken link building campaigns keep track of all sites that produce linkable assets in different industries.

Regardless of whether your site directly competes with a client, you can monitor the sites for fresh content ideas and for future links.

Using content analysis tools like Ahrefs you can see the industry guides tehy opublished with the help of the filter called check Best by Links growth.

This will help you uncover link opportunities for future campaigns. You can look into new markets and see the list of linkable audiences.

Add dedicated .edu pages for search queries.

Links from .edu pages are the type of links that can positively improve your page’s rankings and can help you increase reputation online as a result.

Prior to getting results from .edu link building strategies start with .edu link prospecting. That’s hard to build when you’re starting.

Another approach to scale .edu link prospecting is to start by targeting specific .edu pages in search queries. These websites have information resources spread across counselling, health and wellness, financial aid, community resources and housing.

You can target these pages individually based on the search query and based on the subject of the page or site.

If in the mental health niche you can include search queries like counselling or mental health itself to get a number of search queries.

site:.edu “counseling” inurl:resources

site:.edu “student health” inurl:resources

“career & internship” – job boards, career and health pages
“Health and wellness” health organization sites and niche specific sites.

Finding target pages on .edu sites with link building strategies you’re presently using.

You can also look for scholarship pages. Approach the area with common search queries like site:.edu “scholarships” “topic” and you can get a number of resources to add your link. You can also use the phrase financial aids which is a .edu resource page for students looking for financial help.

Go for libuides queries for .edu link prospects

To prospect high-authority sites is by targeting libguides of .edu websites.

Libguides are cms and information sharing systems available on university sites.

This platform lets easy navigation on relevant resources on subjects, classes and around assignments.

Libuides have a number of benefits. They help students focus on relevant content and remove focus on irrelevant content in other formats or even a difficult topic. This builds up student confidence and helps them get started on their research as well.

Libguides are academic resource pages for students.

Since they don’t get frequent updates, there are a few broken links on those pages. Using this approach you can use broken link building to get high quality relevant links from these good pages

Resource page link building will work if you have a quality content piece you want to rank.

To find these libguides do a search for inurl:libguide site:.edu “topic” and add your topic.

Before pitching these sites, its always useful to find what content, information or content types they prefer to use as references. That’s a great point for you to see.

Ensure when you pitch you have the best and the most comprehensive piece of content you can create on the topic to ensure success.

Save link targets of lower metrics

It’s easy to go over pages with low metrics. However at the start, these link metrics aren’t the best measure. What you need to get doing is build links to your site and then you can improve the metrics as you find more targets.

Low authority sites improve their metrics over time. They get more traffic and increase the number of links to the site and improve the DA.

Exchange contacts with active guest bloggers

Building relationships with other bloggers in your industry is critical for you to expand your list of linking opportunities.

This is an approach you can use to maximize the number of contacts you have.

Share your lists of blogs you contributed to before and also add the contact details of the person you approached.

This will help the both of you with access to a number of active bloggers. This is plenty of opportunity for you to seek a higher response rate when you email them.

Reverse engineer broken pages to get more opportunities.

A number of broken links exist.

Finding bad links on resource pages and sharing them with webmasters is a great way to initiate conversations with them and acquire links by suggesting replacements for these links.

The process begins with you prospecting on resource page.s

Do a google search for common resource page queries starting with inurl: resources “topic or unurl:links “topic”:

Find broken link URLs that can be defunct links you corrected when contacting the first set of prospects.

Check if there are other sites linking out to those broken pages using link tracking tools liek Ahrefs.

Create a spreadsheet where you add all these different sites.

If you get 20 broken links and checked all the pages linking to them, you now have 300 fresh prospects.

This method lands you a number of linking opportunities you may not have thought of before.

One mistake with link building is when looking for resource pages they tend to ignore other tabs. If these pages don’t pass their standard like being irrelevant to the target audience and so on.

Save prospect sites with lower metrics.

When you are on a page and find that it’s not relevant to your audience, move to the next prospects.

If looking at parenting resources and you come across pages for LGBTQ and mental health and others you can make fresh lists to target those pages.

Utilize the advanced search operator “links”

The “Links:” operator gives you a list of web pages linked to the domain you searched. SERPs will get you random results from internal links and web rankings. That calls for us to be selective.

USE GOOGLE COMMAND “LINKS:”

Let’s say you got a competitor domain in and you saw a particular like marketingforamateur on a resource site. Go to google and add links:marketingforamateurs.com to the search bar and hit enter.

Note: Make sure that there is no space after the colon.

Choose a URL from results page which can be a link to a resource.

Go to the “site:” command and add the keyword you’re looking for. We don’t need to use the site operator because here we want a resource page.

You can also use competitor links to generate both keywords and phrases for Google queries. Vist blog posts on websites and get fresh ideas to use from.

When we do the research, we sometimes write words based on how we thought about them. We always fall to the same pattern of thinking.

CONCISENESS

Use short words that are to the point.

CONCRETENESS

Choose words that convey what they mean soon enough. This removes any confusion in their use.

CLARITY

Offer clarity by choosing familiar and concrete words.

Pros:

Since competitors are linking to those pages there’s a good chance the site is relevant to you as well.
Websites shown in SERPs will also give you other niches to tap around.
The links operator is both easy to use and convenient.

Cons:

A good chance that you might not be able to find a topic connected to the industry to link from because your competitor already used the chance.
When checking competitor links follow the blueprint.
Sometimes look for sites that are competitor free.
Not all sites receive links because they are relevant.

Unleash keyword creativity

Lateral thinking helps you approach and solve problems. Being concise is one way to generate a lot of keywords for your research. Another approach for link building is to think out of the box to come up with fresh ideas to tap and keywords to use.

Who will benefit?

Ask yourself who’s going to be interested in the products or services you want to offer. Review possible targets as per their age, gender and other dimensions. Think of potential readers. When selling something say gadgets you look for tech bloggers at first.

Who are the experts?

The second thing to consider is to look for the experts. Look for niche influencers in the industry say tech titans, journalists in tech, car makers and so on.

What are the problems encountered by a niche?

At times we use every available resource with us and you have no idea what more to do to find new keywords. Search for problems within a niche by looking at terms and keywords that only experts in the field or the most experience people know about.

Website: Thesaurus

One of the chief ways to come with new keywords is by making use of a thesaurus. The tool is something we started using way before computers and now online version of it exists as thesaurus.com

Enter a keyword and it generates a keyword arranged in groups and in synonyms and related concepts.

Industry glossary

A glossary of terms is a list of words used by experts that may make it difficult for other persons in the industry to understand. When targeting bloggers who want to write content about your client’s site you must know the kind of jargon they arew using.

C. Blog post titles and URLs

The greatest things in life are at times right before you. This is true for keyword generation. The best ones areright by you. Pay attention to how bloggers in your niche create blog post titles and which words appear in their URls. This is handy when you want to target articles talking about the same topics or having the same content. They use the same keywords but approach these keywords from different angels.

Let’s say you want to write about eCommerce CRMs. You can create a post on the topic or write about pros and cons of eCommerce crms.

allintitle:pros and cons of ecommerce crms
inurl:pros-and-cons-of-ecommerce-crms

D. Wh and H Question Words

Since we are talking about words next comes the opportunity to talk about the language that most content writers are familiar with. Some bloggers answer questions in their niche with their blog.

What who when where why are some of the ways to create content.

Getting links from and to these pages lets you get hold of potential customers who want to look at informational articles before arriving at a decision. A product or service presented to readers as a suggestion helps drive relevant traffic to the site.

Follow search suggestions

Following search suggestions might sometimes be easy. There’s nothing wrong with that. For all possible keywords, simply look at the different search suggestions to your main query. It’s easy to find a list of phrases with the search engine results page. Not all of this is helpful all the time but we can get a few good ones every now and then.

Think creatively

If you find yourselves circling back to the same set of keywords you started with, try going for the bigger picture. Don’t work from the outside, extend internally to the outside.

If your client’s ecommerce site sells flower pots go beyond flower pots. Look at all the possibilities say grow bags, mud pots, plastic pots, silicone pots, pots under $200 and so on.

. Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free tool from Google that both new and experienced marketers alike can use. Keyword planner is a free tool for building search network campaigns or extending existing campaigns. Search for keyword or ad group ideas, get stats and see the list of keywords that perform and create new lists by multiplying together old lists of keywords.