Beat your competition with links - a lot of links
Who is this guide for
This guide is targetted local businesses, SAAS websites, websites that has a blog, and websites that want to target low to medium competition keywords. This guide is targetted new domains, so if you are trying to rank high-competition keywords, or you are in niches like i-gaming, this guide is not for you. But otherwise, read on, and learn how to outrank your competition!
What links should I build for a brand new website?
What links should I build for a brand new website?
There are specific links you should build for a new website. Social media profiles, citations and other types of links. There is also a specific order you should build these links in.
I have spent many years perfecting my methods for doing this task: Building links for a new domain. If you do it correct, you dont have to wait many months to get traction in the Google search results, you can start ranking in days or weeks.
I am going to share my exact linkbuilding process in this blogpost. I am going to show where you can put your web content.
The guide applies for WordPress sites, Wix sites, and other types of web design platforms.
Why focus on linkbuilding for a new WordPress site?
Googles and other search engines algorithms are based on links. Your competition is building links because of this, and so should you.
I recommend that you follow my steps, and build all the links in this guide.
It might seems like a lot of work, but in reality it only takes a couple of weeks.
Consider this: Your competition is doing something, but they are not building ALL of the links in this guide. If you follow these steps, you will have done more than 95% of the sites you are competing with, especially if you are doing local seo. And you will have an easy time ranking for your target keywords.
Start with building a GBP profile if possible
Linkbuilding is all about authority and making Google trust your website. No matter if you are a local or national business, a good starting point is the GBP profile from Google. The GBP profile allows you to build a link to your website, and it also allows for you to insert links to all your social media profiles. More on that below.
GBP posts can contain links
Furthermore, you can create posts and events on your GBP profile with outgoing links to your website, or where ever you want to link.
Below, you can see an example of a GBP post I made, with a link going to my Youtube video.
All in all, the GBP profile is a highly recommended starting point. If your new website is an affiliate website, or you dont have an adress you can skip this point. If you follow my guide, and build all the links below, you will build more than enough link power to rank almost anything.
1. Social media profiles recommended from your GBP
The starting point of all linkbuilding for a new website are the social media profiles. The creation of these profiles is the basic proof, that your website is legitimate.
When you visit your GBP, Google recommends us what social media profiles to build. Most of these social media profiles contain option to link to your website, and some allow links in posts also.
What social media profiles to build
- Youtube
- Twitter/X
- TikTok
How to find the GBP social profiles
Login to the gmail you have connected your GBP with. Go to Google and search your business name. You will see the editor for your GBP.
Click on Edit profile, and scroll down to your social profiles, and you will see something like in the below screenshot. Fill in all the urls for your profiles.
2. Citations
Citations are websites that allow you to enter your company information like website, company name, adress and social media profiles. In many of these websites, you also get to enter a short company description.
They dont deliver a lot of power, but they still play a vital part for local seo. In the days of AI overviews, they are increasing in importance again, because the more places your brand gets mentioned, the more important the LLMs like Google Gemini and ChatGPT think you are. I most definitely advice to build these, especially because you can order them online ready made.
Where to find citations
The two platforms I use for citations are fiverr and legiit. Go to each of these, search for citations, and just find one of the cheapest options. Check out the screenshot below to see what it looks like in Legiit:
3. Press releases
What is a press release
A press release is a text that describes a news worthy event connected to your website. This text is sent to a ring of news websites, that publish such news worthy texts. Its normal to include a link back to your website, and many of these links will be dofollow.
Advantages of press releases
There are three special reasons why I see press releases being super important at the moment.
- You get a lot of referring domains in a very short amount of time. You dont get punished for this, because Googles algorithm knows about press releases. This actually allow you to build a lot more links, shortly after the press release. Because Google is seeing a spike in referring domains, it wont notice it as spam if you also build a lot of other links, at the same time.
- Some of the press releases will rank on page one. Especially for low competition and local keywords. You can use this actively to do parasite seo, and get more than one spot on page one.
- You are training the LLMs to know about you. We can see in Google that press releases are often being sited in the AI overview as sources. We even see that its possible to take over the AI overview for specific terms, but just using a press release.
Where to buy press releases
If budget is not a problem, I recommend Randy the News guy. He has a very good and high quality news service, that delivers a lot of referring domains on a large number of high quality websites like AP News, Yahoo News etc.
If you are on a budget, I suggest checking out fiverr or legiit.com. Its possible to buy press releases for as little as 5USD.
Check out Randy the News guys Press release packages here: https://thenewsguy.com/press-release-page-3/#packages
4. Donate links
Donate links, or donation links, are links that you get by sponsoring a website. Typical examples are your local sports club, your local church, or any type of local community. The upside of these links are, they are typically dofollow, and as not many have them, they can have a large effect on your rankings.
Donate links that are not local
The donate links that I personally use are not local. They are found on sites like https://linuxmint.com/donors.php
You can donate an amount of money, and that gets you a very powerful dofollow backlink. The upside is, that if you find enough of these donate links, your domain authority for sure will go up, and possibly your rankings.
The downside is, for many of them, you have to keep on paying on a monthly basis. Thats also the case with the https://linuxmint.com/donors.php website.
5. Cloud links
Cloud links are my favorite links for boosting domain authority. I use YACSS to build these links.
You can check out the prices for YACSS here: https://yacss.site/pricing/
What are cloud links
Cloud links are static html websites, that are uploaded to subdomains on Google cloud, Amazon cloud, Wasabi cloud, Backblaze cloud and many others. Because they are uploaded to a subdomain, a certain amount of power is inherited from the root domain, which in the case of examples I just mentioned, are super strong.
Many of these cloud platforms have a Domain Authority of over 90, making them extremely powerful.
How does a cloud link look like?
The cloud links can look as good or as bad as you want them to look. I build them using the YACSS website editor, and below is an example of a cloud link I built 4 years ago, thats still ranking in Google to this day.
Where can I learn to build cloud links
There are two advanced cloud stacking seo courses that I sell, where I teach my methods.
- Cloud links. This is a very comprehensive course, where I teach almost all of my methods when building cloud links. This course is for both national and local seo.
- Local linkbuilding 2025. This course is also about cloud links, but is heavily focused on local seo.
Where to buy Done for you cloud links
In the webshop at jespernissen.com you can find the various options to buy cloud links:
https://jespernissen.com/shop/
- Cloud stack for local seo: https://jespernissen.com/product/gbp-cloud-stack/
- Cloud links for domain authority stacking: https://jespernissen.com/product/get-10-cloud-links-for-the-price-of-5/
How many cloud links are there?
YACSS currently have 23 cloud platforms integrated, including Github. You can see in the screenshot below, the large amount of clouds and social media profiles, that its poossible to build using YACSS.
6. Manually built links
Manually built links are links like linktr.ee, about.me and all sorts of links in this category. They are free to build, and they give you a mix of dofollow and nofollow links. Many of these links have a high domain authority, and will give an overall boost in rankings, if you build enough of these types of links.
This link category is one of my favorites. I love building these links manually.
How many manually links should I build
Simply put, as many as you have time to build. The amount of links built is only limited by the time you can spend. Set it as a goal to build a couple of links pr day. And be sure to interlink them. Watch the below video on instructions on how to build these links:
How to find these links
My favorite method of finding these links is ChatGPT. I ask “Give me a list of 30 links that are similar to about.me”. ChatGPT will then provide you with a list, that you can go through. Over time, you can build up a unique list of link opportunities, that not many has.
Buy my secret list of links
If you dont have time to find the links yourself, I have done all the hard work for you.
Last year, I spent three months going through ChatGPTs lists of manual link options. I managed to compile this list of link opportunities, its 103 links, and I personally use these links for my own projects.
You can buy it here for the very reasonal price of 99USD:
https://jespernissen.com/product/103-links-list/
7. Guest posts and other paid links
Once you have done all of the above, the logical next step is guest posts and paid link placements. My favorite platform to buy such links, is the danish platform Bazoom.com. Bazoom is not the only platform that offers paid links, but its very user friendly, and offer good competitor analysis.
You can buy guests posts on large and powerful news sites, as well as normal websites, that have a blog section where they sell links. The way this works is, you buy a link from a large newspaper for example, and then your article gets placed in that newspaper website, with link going to your website.
I know from experience, that these types of links are super strong. The downside is, it gets expensive. Really fast. So if budget is a thing, this might not be for you.
Final words about link building for new websites
If you have completed all of the above, with the exception of step 7, you will rank. Your website will get traffic, and you will get cited in various AI overviews. So, its just a matter of getting started building those links.
I hope you enjoyed this walk through.
This article written by:
Jesper Nissen holds a Master's degree in theoretical physics from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. He began his career in the IT industry in 2004 and founded his first web agency in 2008.
Jesper is the creator of YACSS, a cloud stacking platform, and SchemaWriter.ai, an automated schema generation tool.
As a recognized figure in the SEO community, Jesper has spoken at leading industry events such as SEO Rockstars, Dark AI, hosted by Holly Starks, and Link building mastery in London.
