New Link Building Tools

Let me restate the obvious, building links between your website and other high-quality websites in your niche, is an essential aspect of your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.  I am assuming your link building campaign is well on its way, you have reached out to the professional associations in your niche, you have guest blogged on websites in your industry, you have hopefully formed partnerships with other websites, and your social media efforts have been met.  Great.  But now what?  All the basics have been covered, so you have to dig a little deeper.  This blog will cover my favorite tools for the inevitable wall that all link builders run into, and how to get momentum again with your new link building prospects.

Wordtracker is a tool that I have been using for about a week now with much success.  You can try it out with a free seven-day trial.  They provide a great tutorial about their Link Builder tool, which outlines the steps to get started and the available capabilities.  Wordtracker generates a list of websites that are relevant to your website by collecting your website’s targeted key terms or websites that are already linking to you.  I am still getting used to this one, but overall it does a great job of finding not only websites that would be a good link prospect, but also the exact page that would be most appropriate for hosting your link.

I wouldn’t be able to bring up great link building tools without mentioning SEOmoz.  They specialize in creating tools that assist SEOs in their pursuit of links.  In the past they have had a large collection of link building tools, each having their own contribution to the link building process, but now it seems like SEOmoz has condensed many of these tools into their very popular Open Site Explorer tool.  If you have not familiarized yourself with all of Open Site Explorer’s capabilities I highly suggest taking another look at it.  One of the many tools that Open Site Explorer offers is the ability to see all of the websites that are linking to your competitor, and what content they are linking with.  The new additions to Open Site Explorer include social metrics, like the amount “+1’s”, tweets, and “likes” a page is receiving.  Another of my favorite SEOmoz tools, named Link Acquisition Assistant, asks you for your site’s key terms, and competitors, and then is able to generate search queries that will return great link prospects.  For example, if you type in “skills marketplace” for a key term, and list your competition, Link Acquisition Assistant would generate a list of terms to Google like, “service market place + “submit site”” or “service marketplace + “intitle:resources””.

The last link building tool for this blog post is BuzzStream.  It does a great job at organizing outreach efforts, by generating a list of good websites to pursue, assists in the actual outreach, and keeps track of who you have contacted.  In order to get BuzzStream to generate a list of websites to reach out to, you have to provide it with advanced queries that will return specific, quality results.  For example, if you were trying to find a site that does press releases about SEO you would search, “seo “press release”” or “seo “news release””.  Other searches like this can be generated by SEOmoz’s Link Acquisition  Assistant.  So use SEOmoz’s Link Acquisition  Assistant to generate these advanced searches, then add the searches to your list of searches in BuzzStream, and then BuzzStream will generate a list of websites to reach out to, and contact information for the top websites for your search.  For a more in-depth look into what BuzzStream does check out this video bit.ly/qHD73N.

Good luck with your link building efforts, and if you have any link building tools that have worked for you please leave them in the comments below.