You can have Backlinks for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner - Updated for 2012

FINALLY UPDATED FOR 2012

Haven't taught SEO for awhile now but just recently started again so I've been sharing some tips. Last post was sooo much fun I thought I would keep going. People are always talking about backlinks being the key to ranking and they are right.

Of course the questions is how do you get them? there are tons of ways including creating great content, buying them, buying packages, working on partnering opportunities with other site owners etc. Most seasoned SEO types know they don't really have to buy packages or wonder about where to find opportunities to get backlinks.

The opportunities are steering at us right in the search results for the keywords. Sometimes people call this reverse engineering. Its merely looking up the links of your competitors. You can find ANY kinds of links you are looking for in endless quantity and get this - many won't disappear, won't be spammy and don't have to be "boosted" because they are already indexed and natural

First some good tools and then some observations -

Here are two from the same company and both of them have free versions

SEO SpyGlass Backlink Checker Software: X-Ray Your Competition

SEO spyglass is well known but what some people still might not know is that they recently added the feature of looking up the backlinks of several sites at the same time that are ranking for keywords. This makes it an ideal tool to look and find your competition's backlinks in a particular serp. You can then export those backlink lists (if you have a bought version) into a text comparison program and find out the links that are shared between your competitors (which means you will probably be able to get links there also)

LinkAssistant SEO tool - the most effective SEO software

Link assistant is seldom talked about because it doesn't do very much EXCEPT allow you to get at contact information for a site that you see your competitor using but doesn't have a form to contact the webmaster to give a link. It will search through a site for contact information. Its other utility is to keep track of links that you might have
gotten to see if they remain in place. This tool can actually be pretty useful when you do three way link exchanges regularly or if you buy links and want to make sure they are kept in place.

SEOMOZ also has a tool that searches for backlinks from your competitor and then compares them against other competitors to see where link opportunities are. Although you need to sign up for a paid account SEOmoz routinely has free 30 day trials. They pull from their Open Site explorer backlink tool

Finally one of the best for last

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Has a very extensive backlink database to check your competitors backlink (and keywords as well) and paid they also have a decent competition analysis of the top ten results in a serp something few other sites have.

Of course sometimes the best tool to find links another webmaster has got is Google itself. An inurl search for terms like - resources.php. link.html/links.php - will return hundreds of sites that are in the practice of putting links to other sites on their website. Having a list of sites that in fact have shown they will link to other sites is really solid white hat link building

Finally there is the tried and true technique of taking the link opportunities that appear on your doorstep every day. As any owner of a Wordpress blog knows its only a matter of time before you start to get slammed by blog comment spammers. They leave their backlinks for you to look at almost everyday and since they are spammers the links to their sites tend to be ones that you can easily get yourself.

Now with this approach you end up with a lot of junk links because well - they are spammers. However after running their sites through spyglass look at the outbound link column for sites that are not getting overrun by a lot of spammers. Check those sites and who else has posted to them . Occassionally you will find more discriminate blog commenters on those pages and they can lead you to many other sites that have low outbound links as well.

Finding a good link builder's site can be golden as it ends up leading you to more than one good link resource when you check their backlinks.

Theres no denying though that the best link sites are the ones with moderator/webmaster approval. Sometimes the best link building tool is what you do to and for your own site. If you don't have a site that anyone would really want to link to then finding sites of your competitors will be frustrating as many of the links they get you will not be able to attain even if several of your competitors are getting them.