Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you for the responses everybody I appreciate your input.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful answer and the helpful advice!

I run a very niche blog on getting section 8 housing. I've had the blog for about 6 years and have paid attention to it on and off. For the past few months, I've been ON again. What's appealing to me is the amount of potential traffic the keywords have and small competition. I have knowledge on the subject. I've read Moz seo guides, etc...

The problem is government sites rank high (understandably) or other sites that are nonsense / scams when you search 'section 8 application'. It's very hard to find active bloggers to do link exchange is with as the sites that rank high are trying to scam people and obviously I can't get government back links. I've tried reaching out to people with no avail. I think I have good informative content. All of my adsense goes to charity but at this point it's not much. I'd like to get it out there, white-hat style, but I'm having difficulty. Any suggestions (please be specific), on how I can target sites that would be relevant to this topic and not do generic back-linking (unless you think news submissions, etc will work)?

Thanks!

Thanks for the input!

I have an idea that might help people evaluate casually the strength of backlinks. I'm thinking of building an upvoting list of backlink pages. People can vote on how they feel the strength of the backlink site has personally helped them. This would not be algorithmic or scientific, just a community of people rating their actual success with the strength of the backlinks for particular sites.

Thoughts?

Thanks!