Howdy SEOmozzers I’m Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office. This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to your feedback.

How this post came together...

A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in industries where links are not always easy to come by.  We created a form which asked people two questions -

1. What industry do you work in that you believe it is very hard to get links for?
2. If you could get a link from one website in your industry, what would it be?

We've received loads of great replies and I'm going to cover as many as possible here.  The second question was optional and didn't have to be related to the industry.  Any websites not related to an industry will be covered at the end of the post.  I'm hoping to do another post soon which will cover the rest of the submissions.

My Approach

My usual approach to link building is based on the site itself and identifying what makes that website link worthy, obviously I can't use that approach in this situation!  Instead I'm going to suggest asking yourself four questions -

Important Note: Please do not bypass "Why will they link to me?".  This is probably the hardest question to answer and will require work to get right.  Link building is hard work mainly because you need to spend time creating content that someone wants to link to, if you put time and resource into this part of the process, the rest isn't as difficult.

I'm going to follow this process for some of the sites on this list so that even if non of these sites are in your industry, you can still use the same process to identify link building opportunities for yourself.  The rest of the sites will have some quick tips and ideas for getting links.

Industries that are Tough to get Links for

Here are some of the suggestions we had submitted for tough industries to get links for.

Veterinarians

Who you want a link from: 

Any person who owns a pet and a website

How you are going to get their attention: 

There are lots and lots of forums and online communities out there based around various types of pets.  Joining some of these and posting a few bits of free veterinary advice would certainly get their attention.

How you are going to get a link:

1. Start a Q&A section where users can submit a question and receive free advice from one of your expert vets.  Capture a persons Twitter, Facebook or website address when they ask a question.  Then prioritise questions by those who have a website and answer those first.  Ask them to share the answer on their website as a thank you
2. Add a Jobs Board to your site, if you have a Wordpress blog here is a method on how to do it.  Allow other Veterinarians to post job vacancies to your site and encourage them to promote it on their own site.
3. Ask users to submit photos of their animals and award a prize for the cutest - design a badge for them to use on their website with their pets picture on it - link this to the competition page.  SEOs seem to love cats so I had to include a least one picture!

Image source

Quick Link Targets:

1. Veterinarian Business websites, this search of Dmoz gives you a few good sites to contact

 Jewelry Ecommerce

Who you want a link from: A jewelry making website or blog

How you are going to get their attention:  There are lots of active forums in this industry where you can make contacts and provide good information.  This Twitter list search also provides you with lots of people to contact and interact with.

How you are going to get a link:

1. Run a competition and ask designers and students to design a piece of jewelry which you will feature on your website.  Put all the entries on your website and encourage the entrants to share the link and get their friends to vote for them
2. Create a page on your website that calculates the current price of gold, allow it to be shared easily and embedded on other websites.  You can approach pawnbrokers and see if they want to use the calculator on their own website and credit you with a link
3. Link bait ideas - Men are notoriously bad at buying jewelry and always need help figuring out what to buy and in particular what size ring to buy.  A Mens Guide to Buying Jewelry would work quite well.  Another idea would be to name the top x ways of proposing to your girlfriend.  I wonder if this would make the list :)
4. A bit of a combination of the previous ideas - create a calculator that will tell a guy how much he should spend on an engagement ring

Quick Link Target:

1. Bonus ecommerce tip for all sites which have offline stores - find out if any of them are within a shopping centre or complex.  If the complex has a website listing all of its shops, ask them for a link.  Here is an example of a shop doing this from the Bullring Shopping Centre in the UK -

iPhone Apps for the SEO Industry

I have to admit, this was one of the easiest ones on the list, SEOs love to link to cool apps especially SEO ones!

Ideal person to get a link from: An Experienced SEO Blogger with a Large Following

How to get their attention:  The SEO industry is very active on Twitter, start following your link target and RT them, ask them questions and generally be nice!

How you are going to get a link: 

1. If it is a paid app, give out free copies to top SEO bloggers for them to review
2. If the app is not yet public, give them super secret behind the scenes access to it so they can test it - in exchange for a review
3. If the app is already public, when you add a new feature, ask SEO bloggers to beta test it for you.

Quick Link Targets:

Submit your App to all of these, they give you a link back form your App page

1. http://www.apple.com/webapps/
2. http://www.igoapps.com/
3. http://www.appstorehq.com/developers
4. http://appshopper.com/

Electric Bikes

Who you want a link from: 

A blogger who loves anything eco-friendly, ideally they will have a bicycle of their own at the moment

How you are going to get their attention: 

There are several online communities that you could leverage for outreach.  These include cycling activists and associations, many of whom are active on Twitter such as http://twitter.com/CTC_Cyclists.  There is also the "green" community who encourage the use of eco-friendly products.

How you are going to get a link:

1. Create a calculator which tells someone how much they currently spend on a petrol car or bike along with how much damage this does to the environment.  Make this shareable and send it to bloggers who talk about environmental issues
2. Setup a classifieds section of the website where users can sell their old bikes, you can then ask them to include a link from the British Cycling website if they are a member of the association

Quick Links:

1. http://www.swindonclimate.org.uk/ElectricBikes - there are lots of sites like this in other areas
2. http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Resources/Product-reviews/Nigel-s-eco-product-reviews - get a product review
3. http://www.atob.org.uk/Electric_price_tag.html#h7 - sorry I know that one is a nofollow!
4. http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/electric_vehicles_bikes_conversion_parts.htm

Sound Masking

Link bait idea - overheard office conversations.  This has the potential to be a funny piece of content but with a serious end to it - the need for sound masking in an open plan office.  A good example may be the Head of the HR department speaking about employees in an office which has no sound masking, this could lead to a title such as "Office Conversations you wish you hadn't heard" etc.

Image Source

These guys have created a few graphics to help people understand what sound masking is.  This could be executed and presented in a much better way.  You could create a "before and after" graphic of a sound masking installation to show the effect it has on the workplace.  This could even be tied in with some nice stats and graphs on how it improves efficiency as well.  Eg after sound masking you can expect an x% increase in efficiency.

Business Training - Business NLP

There is an active forum here - http://nlp-experts.org/forum.php which seems to have a small Twitter following as well.  The guy who runs this seems to have some authority in the area and a network of websites which help promote his main business.  If you do a backlink check on the forum you'll find some of these as well as other NLP sites you could get links from.

Classifieds/Online Marketplace

Here I'd focus on certain sections of the site, for example if you have a section with classified ads for used cars.  Focus on this sector and how to get links, one idea would be to go out to car enthusiast websites and offer them a widget or feed which displays a few of the classified ads on their website.  This would work well if you found a site with a focus on a certain make such as BMW.  You could just give them a feed for this section so that it will be of interest to their users.

Here is an example of how Auto Trader are doing this on the Guardian website -

If you have a pets section, you could also use the ideas outlined above in the Veterinarians section.

Fashion Shopping Portal

Ecommerce websites are often seen as difficult to get links for, I can see why as it's hard to attract links to a product page or category page.  The solution is to think about the industry as a whole and what content you can add to other parts of your website to get links flowing in.  There are other methods which I talk about in the next section.

I'm going to cheat here and repeat a tip - add a jobs board which lets fashion students see an updated list of jobs.  The reason I'm repeating this tip is that you can try to get links from high value pages such as this and this. 

Another approach would be to write a guide on How to Get a Job in the Fashion Industry, if you can make this a good guide then you will appeal to loads of websites including this one.

Link Building to an Ecommerce Site with thousands of Products

The challenge here is finding a solution that is scalable, manually building links to thousands of individual pages isn't very practical.  Here is a great article written by Rob which gives you a few starting points.  There is also this article which contains some head-smacking tips from Rand - these are very scalable no matter how many products you have, its just a case of automating the follow up email.

I genuinely think that the key to a successful strategy here is to get your customers to do the link building for you.  Try to add user generated content to every product page along with making products as easy to share as possible via social media. 

Here is an idea of enhancing a standard product page where buyers can leave reviews -

Get customers to upload their videos and photos of their new product to you, then when it has been approved, drop them an email to let them know.  Within this email include a line similar to the head smacking tip I've linked to above.  Ask the person to blog about the content or share it with friends.  Again this is very scalable as it can be automated after the review has been approved.

Gambling

Ok, I'll admit this is a difficult one!  I'd take a similar approach to link building for ecommerce sites, there needs to be another angle built into the website to attract links.  People are not going to naturally link to a small gambling site without a very good reason. 

So give them a good reason, one may be -

Holding the licence to a famous brand that has been turned into a game - an example being movies that are turned into slot machine games.  You can reach out to the online communities around the brand.  Also, many online slot machines started their life as an offline game - try reaching out to users of the offline game and ask them to spread the word that there is actually an online version too

Clothing - No Branded Stuff

I'd target a very specific market here to get links from - fashion students.  If you are not selling branded clothing, then you can appeal to young, creative clothing designers who want to make a name for themselves.  You can contact Universities and Colleges to ask if students want to contribute designs to your site in exchange for some publicity, they could link to it from the University website to help promote it.  

The other angle here is to contact individual fashion students with their own blogs such as this one who may want to take part themselves, then link to their design once it is live on your website.  I also found this competition which you could do an online version of.

Web Hosting

A quick win here would be to ask sites who use your service link to you from their website.  In the same way a web design firm may receive a link, its something that Fasthosts seem to do as you can see on this website.

Also submitted with this industry was a website that is hard to get links from, the site was http://www.php.net so I'm going to include this here as well.

http://www.php.net/links.php

Here are a few ways to get links from this page:

1. Publish a news feed, you can do this by hiring a guest author if you have limited in-house resource
2. If you have a member of staff who speaks another language, ask them to start writing a section on your site in that languauge
3. Create some cool merchandise - the geekiest the better!  A t-shirt which is only funny if you are a PHP coder could work quite well

There is also the possibility of getting a link from http://www.php.net/conferences/ if you run a conference on PHP.

Components for Microsoft Visual Studio

This is quite a big area which can improve the scope of the websites that you can target.  I found http://www.mcmsfaq.com/links.asp which links to a number of websites who work with various Microsoft technologies.

Another quick win would be to ask for a link from the companies you work with, especially if you do any work with .NET on their websites or have build various components of their systems.

Websites that people struggle to get links from 

Here are a few websites submitted to us that people wanted to get a link from.

http://www.reiclub.com

This is a Real Estate Investing website, they have a few different forums on various topics.  You can have a link in your forum signature but they have a number of rules to follow.  Make sure you are contributing to the forum and helping people before you start dropping links, otherwise I doubt the links will stay there for long.

If you are a money lender you also may stand a good chance of getting a link from this page http://www.reiclub.com/hard-money-lenders.php

http://www.statefarm.com

State Farm is a US based insurance website, there isn't an obvious way to get a link but it is possible if you are an agency.  You can get a profile page which includes a link to your website.

http://www.education.gov.uk/

This one immediately struck me as being difficult, not just because of the domain name, but because of the page they have in the top right corner called "Linking" which outlines their very strict linking policies!

So lets be creative - get them to tweet a link to your website.  Ok this can be difficult but there benefits go way beyond the link itself on this one.  Their following is around 3,000 people, a tweet from them could bring you a lot of traffic and links from other sites.  You'd also get a link from their homepage as they display the latest tweet from their profile, looking at the frequency of their tweets, this link could be in place for a few days.  I'll admit this one is a bit sneaky but it could get you a link from their homepage and bring lots of attention.

Bit of free advice for the Department of Education

As a sidenote, this website is showing at Google Toolbar PR0 which I found strange.  Turns out that they recently moved domains which is a valid reason, however their old site - http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ is using a 302 redirect.  Unless they are planning to take the redirect down very soon I would use a 301 instead!

Finally - www.seomoz.org

This was actually the most popular site that people wanted to get links from.  This may surprise you but there are a few ways to do this!

1. Get your Moz points score above 100 to get a followed link from your profile.  Read about how to get Mozpoints here
2. Write a good blog post and it could be included on Youmoz along with a link to you
3. Put extra special effort into the post and it could be promoted to the main blog - bringing you lots of extra attention, links and readers.  This is a great example of how putting extra effort into creating content will benefit you when it comes to getting quality links

Well that is it for now, please let us know what you think and of course if you have any additional tips please add them in the comments.  You can also catch me on Twitter if you want.