Where do I get backlinks?

[rivercityransom]

Three months ago I made the "foolish" decision to launch an insurance quote website (didn't think of looking into how competitive insurance websites were before investing my time, money and energy). Due to budget costs, I have been forced to learn about SEO. At this point I would say I am at the Peon level. lol.

Today I signed up for SEOmoz and have found that my competitors have TENS OF THOUSANDS of backlinks. To logical people, this would be enough to throw in the towel. Not me. I'm stupid.

I have spent many many hours over the last few months creating backlinks (at least I thought I was). However, I want to start targeting the sites that my competitors are using because they are getting anchor texts.

How do I do this? How do websites create so many back links? Some of my competitors have 50,000 backlinks! I know this won't be done overnight. I appreciate all the help the SEOmoz community can offer a Peon like myself.

One day I promise to pay it forward.

[anthonydnelson]

Brad-

My advice may be a tough thing to swallow, but if you are competing in an industry as competitive as insurance quotes, "building" back links isn't ever going to get you ahead. You are so far behind the established sites, that manual outreach will likely never catch you up.

Instead, you need to focus on making your website so much better than the other similar website's so people start to use yours and it begins to naturally build links from authority websites. Making this website will be a big investment.

My example for this would be Hipmunk for flight search. They made their product unique, fun and extremely useful. People began to talk about them. Links from authority sites began to show up.

[KLLC]

Hi Brad,

Link building: no matter how many you have backlinks. The important thing is. Are your backlinks having relevancy and high page rank? Anyway, Here is the answer of your question.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-death-of-link-building-and-the-rebirth-of-link-earning-whiteboard-friday

Thanks

KLLC

[Bryan_Loconto]

Forget building links and start earning them.

Build a blog on your site and create data that people will naturally link to and share on social media outlets. You need to do some #RCS

If you create great content and share it to the appropriate markets you will achieve results.

Remember it is better to have content on your site get shared, then content that you create for soemone elses blog which linking to your site.

[rivercityransom]

Thank you for the honesty. I have considered this over the past few weeks and have been brainstorming solutions that will separate my site from the competitors. I'm going to read up on Hipmunk, thank you.