There are many tools available to help you become a more efficient link builder. The one thing to bear in mind is that you can’t build genuinely good links 100% with a tool. There needs to be some form of human interaction, at some point, to ensure that the right level of quality control is met.
Also, I’ve struggled to find a single tool that does everything I want when it comes to link building. I tend to use a combination of small tools to speed up a few parts of the link building process.
On a personal note, I don’t use that many tools. Honestly. I wrote about this on State of Search so you can see which ones I favor and why. I’m also a bit of a believer in doing stuff manually first; I like SEOs who know how to build links without using any kind of tools. I feel that this helps develop your instinct much more and lets you use your gut feeling when building links. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use tools if they can help speed things up or make you more efficient, but at least be aware of the process behind a tool so that you know exactly what is going on in the background.
To try and keep this list as up to date as possible, I’ve created this page that I’ll keep up to date as I find and test new tools - http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/link-building-tools.html – this is not linked to from my site, it is just for you guys so please don’t share it on Twitter etc!
Link analysis
Open Site Explorer
Link: www.opensiteexplorer.org
What it does: Open Site Explorer lets you run link analysis on pretty much any domain. It is powered by the SEOmoz crawler which crawls and indexes backlinks. The data in Open Site Explorer updates, roughly, once a month. I’ve personally found that the SEOmoz crawler tends to crawl lots of domains but will not always crawl deeply within that domain. So if a link is a few levels away from the homepage, then it may not show up in Open Site Explorer results.
I do really like the interface of Open Site Explorer as it is super clear and easy to understand. I also like the metrics that SEOmoz provide within Open Site Explorer such as Domain Authority and Page Authority.
Cost: Free for limited use, full access requires a paid SEOmoz account starting at $99 a month Related articles:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/help/ose-overview
★ http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketingopportunities
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-open-site-explorer-fromseomoz.
html
AHREFs
Link: www.ahrefs.com
What it does: AHREFs is the newest of the link analysis tools on the market. It updates once a day and seems to provide pretty good, fresh link data. It is also pretty quick when diving deeper into some of the numbers. It isn’t as pretty as Open Site Explorer but the data makes up for this.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $79 a month
Related articles:
★ http://ahrefs.com/tutorials/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-tool-review-ahrefs-138676
Majestic
Link: www.majesticseo.com
What it does: Majestic has its own crawler which is pretty powerful, in fact it did have a reputation for being a bit too powerful and sometimes over-reporting on link numbers. However this has improved greatly and it is probably my favorite link analysis tool right now because of its freshness – it updates once a day and crawls quite deeply.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $49.99 a month
Related articles:
★ http://blog.majesticseo.com/how-to-videos/
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/majestic-seo/
Microsoft Excel
Link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/
What it does: If you’re an SEO and do not know how to use Excel, you’re losing out, big time. It isn’t just useful for link analysis, there are a wide range of things that SEOs can use it for. Cost: Free trial, you can buy on it’s own for $139.99
Related articles:
★ http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/
★ http://seogadget.com/category/microsoft-excel/
Google Webmaster Tools
Link: www.google.com/webmasters
What it does: Google Webmaster Tools is a large toolset and link analysis is just one section. Google shows you a sample of the links they have in their link graph pointing at your website. Over time, Google seems to have increased this sample and are showing more links to Webmasters than ever before. They actually seem to provide the most comprehensive list of incoming links now, compared to the other link analysis tools above. This is a study by SEOgadget which appeared to demonstrate this, but, as this article points out, you should try and use all the data you can get your hands on.
Cost: Free
Tom Anthony’s link profiler
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity
What it does: This is a nice little Google Doc-based tool that allows you to do some quick analysis on your link profile to find anomalies. You can also compare directly against competitors to see who stands out and then dive into the possible reasons why. It is based on Open Site Explorer data and you can use it with or without Mozscape API access.
Cost: Free
Link Research Tools by Cemper
Link: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/
What it does: This is actually a suite of tools, one of which is for link analysis. You can also do other things like link prospecting, competitor analysis, and monitoring links that are live. It pulls in lots of data from different sources, and they appear to crawl links to make sure they are still live before letting you run analysis on them.
Cost: Starts from 199 Euros up to 1299 Euros
Outreach
BuzzStream
Link: http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/buzzstream.html
What it does: BuzzStream is best described as a CRM tool for link building. It allows you to manage your outreach by keeping track of who you’ve contacted, the emails you’ve sent, and the links you’ve built. It can also help with link prospecting and is very good for pulling in a range of metrics very quickly such as PageRank, Domain Authority and IP address. One feature I also really like is that BuzzStream will automatically try to find contact details for a list of websites that I give it. This can be a real time saver.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $29 a month.
Related articles:
★ http://www.seobook.com/comprehensive-review-buzzstream
★ http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/03/buzzstream-a-blogger-outreach-toolreview.
html
★ http://www.paddymoogan.com/2012/07/02/infographic-link-building-using-buzzstream/
Tout
Link: http://www1.toutapp.com/
What it does: Tout allows you to do a number of things related to email outreach. It can help you track the emails you send, record stats on whether an email has been viewed, and if links have been clicked on. It can also be used to schedule the sending of emails, and you can write your own templates, which are quick to access. A quick note here is that the features that Tout uses for some of the tracking may sometimes trip spam filters, as pointed out in this article by SEER.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $30 a month
Related articles:
★ http://www1.toutapp.com/resources/tout-university/seo
Highrise
Link: http://highrisehq.com/
What it does: Highwise isn’t designed as an SEO tool, but its features make it very useful for keeping outreach organized. It can help you keep track of email conversations, remind yourself to follow up, and allow you to keep all your link building contacts in one place.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts starting at $24 a month
Boomerang
Link: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/
What it does: In terms of outreach, Boomerang has a couple of nice features. First, it allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a specified time, which can be really useful if you’re doing outreach to people in a different time zone to yours. The other nice feature it has is the ability to remind you if someone hasn’t replied to one of your emails. You can tell Boomerang to email you if someone hasn’t replied within a certain time frame; you can then follow up with that person.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkbuilder-gmail-productivity-setup-and-outreachexamples
Rapportive
Link: www.rapportive.com
What it does: Rapportive has two nice features for link building. It can help you create more customized outreach emails because it will show you more information about the person you’re contacting. As soon as you paste their email address into your Gmail, Rapportive will look for any information it can find about them such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc. This allows you to find out a little bit more and maybe customize your email a bit more. The other feature is that Rapportive can help you find someone’s email address. You can effectively “guess” someone’s address, and, when you have got it right, their social networks and picture will probably appear!
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.johnfdoherty.com/rapportive-linkbuilding-tool/
★ http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anybodys-email-address/
★ http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2075466/Rapportive-Robust-Social-Profiles-inyour-
Gmail
Xobni
Link: www.xobni.com
What it does: Pretty much the same as Rapportive but will work for those of you that use Microsoft Outlook instead of Gmail.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
Linksy Email guesser
Link: http://linksy.me/find-email
What it does: As the name suggests, this tool allows you to guess what a person’s mail address is by providing their first name, surname and associated domain – such as the company they work for or their blog. It will then show you if it matches the guessed emails to any records online such as gravatars or social profiles.
Cost: Free
URL opener
Link: http://www.urlopener.com/index.php
Cost: Free
What it does: URL opener is a really simple tool that allows you to paste a load of URLs into a box, then, with the click of one button, you can open every one of those URLs in a new tab. This is really useful when working with lots of websites doing link prospecting. Rather than having to open each URL one by one, you can just paste them into this tool and save yourself a lot of time.
Followup.cc
Link: http://www.followup.cc/
What it does: This tool is very similar to Boomerang in many aspects. It allows you to create email reminders for yourself to make sure that you follow up on your outreach. You simply bcc pre-defined email addresses into your email, and that is it. For example you could bcc in 1week@followup.cc and you’ll get a reminder in one week.
Cost: Free
Competitor analysis
Search Metrics
Link: http://www.searchmetrics.com/
Cost: Monthly subscriptions starting from $99 up to $949+
What it does: Search Metrics does all kinds of things such as rank checking, keyword research, link checking, basically it covers a bunch of features all in one place, which is very handy. However, the one thing that I find it useful for is getting a quick snapshot of my competitors. It lets me get a rough idea of how they are doing in terms of traffic compared to my own website and gives me an idea what keywords they rank for. It isn’t going to be 100% accurate, but it is good enough for a quick comparison.
Related articles:
★ http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/searchmetrics-essentials-wow.html
Browser add-ons
SEOmoz Toolbar
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar
What it does: The SEOmoz toolbar allows you to run some quick on-page and link analysis on the page you’re currently viewing. For example, you can quickly check the on-page elements of a page such as page title, headers, use of rel=canonical tag, etc. It can also highlight nofollow links for you, which is a pretty useful tool to have switched on. In terms of link analysis, the toolbar can access some metrics such as Domain Authority, Page Authority and the number of links pointing to a domain. One other thing which I love is the SERP overlay, which will show you link data below each URL in a Google search result, so you can quickly compare their link data.
Cost: Free after you register but requires a paid SEOmoz account ($99 a month) to access all the link data
Majestic
Link: http://blog.majesticseo.com/development/chrome/
What it does: Currently only available in Chrome, the Majestic SEO extension lets you quickly access link data for the URL that you’re currently on. It can give you the links to a URL, the anchor text, the history of links and a lot more. It is super nifty for some quick link analysis. Cost: Free for basic use (still lots of data) but if you want details, you’ll need a Majestic account which start at $49.99 a month
Scrape similar
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/
mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en
What it does: Scrape Similar allows you to quickly scrape text from a web page. This could be a list of many links and you don’t want to go through each one and copy and paste one by one. So Scrape Similar lets you right-click on one of them and quickly grab other links that are in the same format.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
Check my links
Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/
ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf?hl=en-GB
What it does: This Google Chrome extension will check all links on a page and find which ones are broken. It will then highlight them in red so you can easily scan the page and find broken links. For link building purposes, this can help with broken link building as well as finding broken external links on your own website.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
Google Cache bookmarklet
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-nifty-seo-bookmarklets-to-make-you-more-efficient
What it does: This lightweight bookmarklet will check if the page you’re currently on is cached by Google. This helps you in a number of ways because, if a page isn’t cached, it may indicate a problem unless the page is very new and hasn’t been discovered by Google yet.
Cost: Free
Finding link opportunities
BuzzStream blogroll checker
Link: http://tools.buzzstream.com/blogroll-list-builder
What it does: This tool lets you paste in a list of URLs and it will go and find if those pages have blogrolls. If they do, then the tool will return a list of the URLs in those blogrolls. This can be great for expanding your outreach list quickly.
Cost: Free
Related articles:
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/free-tool-build-outreach-lists-from-blogrolls.html
Broken link finder by Citation Labs
Link: http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com/
What it does: Broken link building is a tactic we’ve talked about in this book. This tool automates a lot of the process and makes it a lot easier to find link opportunities and do outreach. It will take a core keyword from you and run Google searches based on this, it will then return link opportunities which you can sort and filter.
Cost: Packages start at $67 a month
Related articles:
Ontolo
Link: http://ontolo.com/
What it does: Ontolo allows you to run automated searches for potential link targets. You simply choose your parameters and keywords, then Ontolo will go and do the hard work of scraping Google and will pull back a list of targets for you to approve or reject. For example you could look for “links pages” about “pets” and get a list of opportunities into your account.
Cost: Free trial and paid accounts start at $97 a month
Related articles:
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-ontolo-105801
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/ontolo/
Link prospector by Citation Labs
Link: http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/
What it does: The link prospector allows you to find link targets quickly. You can define the keywords that are related to your website along with the types of link you are looking for, then it will search Google for you. You can then filter through the results to find which ones you want to outreach to.
Cost: Free trial, monthly plans start at $27
Related articles:
★ http://pointblankseo.com/link-prospector
★ http://wiep.net/link-building-tools/link-prospector/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-link-prospector-120992
Group High
Link: http://www.grouphigh.com/
What it does: Group High lets you find bloggers who you may want to outreach to and start building a relationship with. You can use Group High to find bloggers or you can import your own lists of bloggers. It will then go and find lots of metrics about the blogs and try to find contact details too.
Cost: Approx $3000 a year
Related articles:
★ http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2012/01/25/is-your-blog-in-this-pr-database-of-1-3-millionblogs/
★ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/does-grouphigh-take-the-pain-out-of-bloggeroutreach/
45627/
SEOmoz link intersect
Link: http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
What it does: Powered by Mozscape, the link intersect tool will tell you who is linking to your competitors but not to you. This can help you find some easy link opportunities because if a website is linking to several of your competitors, then they may link to you as well.
Cost: Requires a paid SEOmoz account, starting at $99 per month
Related articles:
★ http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/how-to-use-buzzstream-with-the-competitive-linkfinder-
from-seomoz.html
Wordtracker link builder
Link: http://www.wordtracker.com/linkbuilder
What it does: This software from Wordtracker (famous for their keyword research software) allows you to identify link opportunities by looking at who links to your competitors but not you. You can then filter by various methods and add the best sites to a list that you can then work through.
Cost: Free trial with paid accounts costing $69 per month
Blogger Link Up
Link: http://www.bloggerlinkup.com/
What it does: Blogger Link Up is a mailing list that you can subscribe to. For SEOs, you will receive a list of bloggers who are looking for people to send them guest blog content. So it can be a nice easy way of finding some link opportunities. You will need to keep a close eye on quality though because a few low-quality websites can appear sometimes.
Cost: Free
Guestr
Link: http://guestr.com/
What it does: Guestr is a website where bloggers can register their interest in having people send them guest post content. You can also register and browse the various categories of blogs to find ones relevant to your niche and contact them from within the Guestr interface.
Cost: Free
My Blog Guest
Link: http://myblogguest.com/
What it does: My Blog Guest was setup by an SEO named Ann Smarty. It allows bloggers and SEOs to connect with each other. As an SEO you can find bloggers who are in your niche and happy to accept good quality guest post content.
Cost: Free
Blogdash
Link: http://www.blogdash.com/
What it does: Blogdash allows bloggers to register themselves and make their details searchable on the website. You can filter by categories to find bloggers whom you may want to engage with.
Cost: Basic membership is free, full access starts at $29.99
Local Citation Finder by Whitespark
Link: https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/
What it does: Focused primarily on improving local SEO rankings, the local citation finder will help you find places where you can list your business online. You won’t always get a link (hence the word citation), but this can be a great way of finding some easy link opportunities. You start with a local keyword and the tool will look for opportunities for you. You can then use the interface to keep track of your work and where you have listed your business.
Cost: Free for a basic account, paid accounts start at $20 a month
Raven
Link: http://raventools.com/
What it does: Raven does lots and lots of things, but, in terms of link building, it can help you find link opportunities and manage the outreach that you carry out to these websites. It also pulls in data from Majestic which allows you to run link analysis on any domain.
Cost: Free trial, paid accounts start at $99 per month
Related articles:
★ http://skyrocketseo.co.uk/raven-tools-review/
★ http://searchengineland.com/link-building-tool-review-raven-tools-95727
★ http://www.seobook.com/raven-seo-tools-review
Link building query generator by Stoked SEO
Link: http://stokedseo.co.uk/2012/10/17/query-generator/
What it does: This is a simple Google Docs based tool, which will generate a bunch of search queries based on a keyword that you give it. You can enter a keyword, choose the type of link opportunity you’re looking for, and then open the query links directly into a Google search.
Cost: Free
HARO – Help a Reporter Out
Link: http://www.helpareporter.com/
What it does: HARO is a service that alerts you when reporters and writers are looking for news sources. These are generally high level writers so you’ll always need to provide legitimate, quality sources, but, in return, you could get good mentions and links from high quality websites.
Cost: Starts from $19 a month
Related article:
★ http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/better-than-link-building-authority-building-haro/
5963/
Followerwonk
Link: http://followerwonk.com/
What it does: Followerwonk is primarily a Twitter analytics tool, but it has one nice little feature that allows you to find people on Twitter who have websites, influence, and are relevant to you. It is the Search Bios feature which we have looked at already.
Cost: Free version but requires an SEOmoz Pro account ($99 a month) for full features
Related articles:
★ http://www.oxondigital.co.uk/how-to-use-followerwonk-to-support-your-twitteroutreach-
campaigns/
★ http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/10/26/turning-seo-link-building-into-seo-audience-targetingwith-
twitter-profiling/
Zemanta
Link: http://www.zemanta.com/
What it does: There are a few ways to use Zemanta, from a link building point of view you are able to add your website’s content to the Zemanta database, this means it will be displayed to bloggers who are looking to quote sources of information when writing content. This works via a plugin that sits in their CMS while they are writing. So if a blogger is writing about SEO, they will be shown content related to SEO which they may want to link to in their article. The same principle also works with images.
Cost: Works on an impression basis, the more impressions you are given to bloggers, the more you pay.
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