You as a link builder, webmaster or search engine optimizer want the best links possible for your website and I want you to find them. That’s why I put together this list of some of the best link building resources and tools that are out there, to get you the best results you can possibly muster. Now, technically speaking, any tool for SEO can be reimagined for link building, but a long list of complicated and confusing tools is not what you want, or what you need! So here you are with the ultimate 50 link building resources and tools.
Understanding Link Building
Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO: Chapter 7
If you’re puzzled by Link Building and SEO, Moz is there to help you through it. Link building basics are covered in Chapter 7, but the whole piece of content is worth checking out no matter what skill level you are at.
Link Building Slide Shows on Slideshare
Everyone has a different view and take on link building so getting many different opinions can often be helpful! Search on Slideshare to find some great in depth resources that each lay out link building a little bit differently.
Jason Acidre’s Blog: Kaiser the Sage
There are many influential people in the SEO and SEM indtrusty but none stand out as data driven link builders quite like Jason. His blog is chock full of the most up to date link building methods as well as impending penalties from Google. I suggest going through some of the latest articles as well as some of the great link bait articles such as 44 Creative and Innovative Link Building Experts and Their Strategies.
Search Engine Land’s Link Building Library
If you’re looking for something akin to the history of link building, Search Engine Land is there for you. They’ve been covering link building for a very long time and are considered one of the utmost authorities on it, hence their archive is the perfect place to learn the evolution of the task.
The Definition of Link Building
Point Blank SEO put out a great post on what exactly link building is. There are a lot of articles out there on link building, but if you’re looking to explain what precisely the task is, this is the post you’re looking for.
Link Building vs. Content Marketing
You’ve heard content is king, but did you know that link building helps decide which king rules the SERPs? Rand Fishkin over at Moz makes a great case for using both content marketing and link building for separate occasions.
Google’s Beginner Guide to SEO
While this document is a little outdated, it has the basics that every budding SEO and link builder should understand and be comfortable with in order to fully vet a site or even determine if a site will pass pagerank on.
SEO Subreddit
You may or may not use Reddit in your daily life to keep up on other news, but the largest multi topic in the world is teeming with info you might want to know about. While a lot of the posts can be promotional or simple questions, it’s a great space to ask questions and stay up to date on the underbelly of SEO.
Link Building Strategies
Link Detective
If you are attempting to check out some competitor backlinks or performing an analysis to find more opportunities on your own site, you’ll want to be able to classify what you’re looking at fairly quickly. Link Detective allows you to sign up for a free account and check out what the backlinks to a site physically look like. You can see a nice pie chart break out of things like Dead links (which you can work to reclaim), Banner Ads, In Text, and Sidebar links as well as a list of each of them.
Check My Links
If you’re trying to analyze a website for broken links, look for no easier a tool than Check My Links. It is a simple Chrome plugin that activates with one click of a button and will check every link on the page for things such as 404, 301 and 302 issues. They do not check plugin activated links (such as intext advertisements), Adsense links and Nofollow links so you may need an additional tool or manually test these links if you encounter them.
Robin Gupta Bulk Domain Authority Checker
If you haven’t got time to download a new program in order to quickly check Domain Authority, IP Address, Alexa Rank or Page Rank, this site can save you. All you have to do is upload a list of sites with a line break in between and let the tool do its magic.
Moz’s Open Site Explorer
Finding a site’s backlinks is not difficult with Open Site Explorer. One of the best known and talked about resources in the industry, OSE will pull backlinks of any website that is entered into the box. You can only run three searches per day if you are not a paid Moz subscriber however, so use them wisely!
Majestic SEO Site Explorer
Similar to OSE, Majestic will show you backlinks to any site you enter into the command box. This one isn’t free however, but might be a good substitution for anyone looking to only purchase a backlink explorer and not needing the whole Moz Suite.
Fresh Web Explorer
If you are looking for branded mentions to add links to, Moz has heard your cries of frustration! Fresh Web Explorer will show you any mention of a brand or keyword phrase that has occurred within a selected time frame.
Google Alerts
Let the fresh content come to you! If you are working with the same client or keyword phrase month after month, consider setting up a Google Alert to be automatically emailed every time there is a new mention of it online. One of our favorites here is to use a specific industry keyword in addition to the word “blog” so that each time it is mentioned on a blog we are notified. This is really only for the brave of heart or those who are confident in their email sorting abilities, as a really popular name or keyword mention can easily take over your inbox if your settings aren’t tweaked just right.
SEMRush
If you are interested in seeing which keywords your site or a competitor’s site are ranking for, consider making use of this tool. While the free version is somewhat limited, it still can showcase some important data such as traffic patterns, country of origin for traffic and organic keywords that the site is ranking for.
Bing
We live and breathe results in Google, but using Bing every so often as type of diversification can sometimes yield opportunities that may have gone otherwise unnoticed.
Followerwonk
They say it is easier to forge a strong relationship if you have a relationship already. Checking in on the people who follow you already to see if there are any possible relationships that can sprout a link.
Linkbuilding Outreach: A Post on Search Engine Land (Outreach)
This post goes over various strategies for link building as well as some of the best ways to outreach to those webmasters. You’ll never doubt your email skills again!
Image Raider
Reverse image search is a great way to grab links that should have been yours anyway and this tool makes it easy to trace back your awesome content and ask for a link.
Crafting A Search Query
Guest Posting Query Generator
If you’re not too savvy with the Google search operators and you’re looking to find a guest post, Guest Post Labs can help you out. Simply enter a keyword or two and hit “generate”. On the next page it will show you a list of querys that you can simply click on to find potentially new and exciting opportunities. While it uses the same queries each time and simple substitutes in your keyword, the clickable feature makes for an easy list to run down for each new keyword or client.
Applied Search Queries for Link Building
This in depth article gives up some of the most detailed ways to find new links using search operators and it’s open for everyone to see. It goes beyond just guest posting to narrowing topical sites such as Libraries or those which review products.
Uber Suggest Keyword Suggest Scraper
The Google suggest tool which shows us all what people are searching for has been harnessed into something we can actually search in this one easy to use tool. Simply enter a top level keyword and where you would be looking (web, images, news, etc.), fill out the captcha and watch what happens next. Your keyword is paired with hundreds of long tail suggestions in alphabetical order and clicking on each phrase potentially releases a nesting of other phrases as well. This is great for discovering more of those long tail keywords that might not have been found before and which can easily be added to search queries to find a larger or more in depth audience.
Visual Thesaurus
Exploratory research of keywords gets a visual makeover in this beautiful tool. Simply type in your top level keyword and hit “Look it Up”. The tool should pop up a new window with spiderwebs of information that you can click on and see relevant keywords that are directly related to what you are searching for. This can help broaden your search queries to find some unique places to ask for a link.
Buzzstream’s Query Generator
Buzzstream’s Query generator is unlike any other out there. It takes into account your website as well as your competitor’s website to craft queries. It suggests not only guest post search operators, but some for the news section of Google as well to help you seek out any fresh content you could be linking to.
Google Correlate
Looking for synonyms for a keyword can be a daunting task but Google Correlate makes it fairly easy to find “finds search patterns which respond with real-world trends”.
Keyword Combination Tool
The best way to ensure you’re finding every possible opportunity for a certain niche is to use every possible keyword combination for a search query. While some of the results might be similar, it can never hurt to switch things up and find the perfect combination which yields the best linking opportunities.
Perfecting Outreach
Mail Tester
If you need a website’s e-mail address and WhoIs.com doesn’t seem to be working, you might have to try to use many iterations of standard e-mail addresses before you get the webmaster. Things like info@domain.com or contact@domain.com are common e-mail addresses on a domain. With Mail Tester you can see if the e-mail is valid before trying all different combinations which will save some time and effort in the end. It does take a minute to ping the server, so try to be patient while it works its magic.
Who.is
If you’re struggling to find a webmaster’s email address on the web site, check out the Whois information. When someone registers a domain, they are required to provide certain information which often becomes public knowledge. This is not available for every website and can be outdated, but hey, it’s a start!
Why Webmasters Aren’t Replying to Your Outreach
A great article on the Moz Blog that documents some of the common snafus all link building beginners can be prone to. While there are thousands of articles on the subject, this one is relatively short and to the point while also being witty enough to keep your interest.
Raven Tool’s Outreach Basics
Raven tools has made one of the best reporting tools for link building that there is, but did you know their blog is also a wealth of resources on the process of link building? They’ve put together a great piece of content call Link Building Basics and chapter Two is all about the outreach!
Boomerang for Gmail
Link Building is often more about emails than actual links and organizing and tracking those conversations can be a daunting task. If you’re using Gmail to send your emails, you can install Boomerang to see when someone reads your email or if they never even open it.
Rapportive
Sometimes you can’t find an email online, but you can figure out what the contact’s email might be. If you have Rapportive installed with Gmail, once you begin composing a new email, simply typing in a possible email address can show you which social sites that email is associated with and might be helpful to confirm or deny if the email address is actually in use.
Creating Content
Brainstorm Topic Ideas
Many site that accept guest posts are not looking for evergreen content, they are looking for something timely and worthy of some clicks. If you don’t know how to, or simply don’t want to look through Google News, Bing, Yahoo Answers, Trending Twitter, Reddit and others for the hottest topics on a particular subject, then this tool can help you. You simply open the Google Doc, Click File, then Make a Copy of the spreadsheet for your own use. After this you plug in a keyword and hit enter. You should see some news items populate in their respective fields and don’t forget to scroll all the way to the sides to find what you’re looking for. Please do not go and copy already posted content titles, but let them instead inspire you to create your own!
The Guide to Sourcing Images
Almost all guest posts are made better by a great picture, but finding an inexpensive license free picture or signing up for a stock photo site can take a lot of time. This handy guide by Simply Zesty highlights some of the best ways to be creative about pictures and find some great free photos online without breaking your budget or any laws.
Morgue File Pictures
Morgue File is the ultimate place to find some decent pictures that are royalty free and often don’t even require attribution. Spruce up your next guest post quickly and easily!
Hubspot’s Free 75 Photos
What’s better than free images? Free images you’ll actually want to use! Hubspot has offered up 75 free stock photos that are all downloadable in exchange for filling out a simple lead generation contact form. They’re fairly high quality and are well shot and edited so you might as well check them out!
Alltop
If you’re stuck for content ideas, check out what some of the best blogs online are looking for! Alltop is a great aggregator of top level blogs who routinely produce great timely and relevant content, in a variety of industries. Simply do a search at the top of the page and let the inspiration begin!
Buzzfeed
If you are trying to understand what someone under 30 might be thinking about in the course of a day, check on Buzzfeed. This is a community sourced website that posts some of the most on-topic articles in addition to some of the most off-the-wall. Let the creative writing and content style guide you! Buzzfeed articles are often accompanied by gifs, embedded songs, pop culture references and youtube videos which help to keep attention on the page and promote social shares. Don’t let your next guest post be just plain text, add another creative element into it!
Plagiarism Checker
This completely free tool allows you to check any amount of content for duplicates on the web. It’s simple to use, and can help you to avoid posting on a site that grabs content from elsewhere, or publishing an article you’ve already used on another guest post.
Efficiency Tools
Spy On Web
Find Networks of sites with the same IP address. You may or may not know that a network of sites on the same IP is a sitting duck for a potential Google penalty; if one site gets a penalty the others may soon follow. Protect yourself and avoid these sites if you can! To help you do just that, simply enter the website url, IP address, google adsense or google analytics code and find out what resources belong to the same owner. Free of charge!
NetPeak Checker
If you’ve ever needed to quickly analyze home page Page Rank and blog page Page Rank of a few different sites this tool is for you. It will also analyze about 70 other things if you ask it to, including IP address, Alexa Rank, Domain Authority, Number of Text Backlinks, Social shares and more. It takes a moment or two to figure out, and you have to stay on top of the updates (or the tool simply stops working) but I promise to you it is worth the learning curve.
Timer Tab
If you have a lot to accomplish in a day, keeping track of your time spent on tasks can help you make your time the most efficient as possible. This handy tab can help you track your time right where you are working, in your browser tab. It shows you the countdown where the page title normally is, so you’re never left guessing.
Google as a Timer
If you’re not keen on opening yet another tool to keep track of your time, simply ask Google to keep track of a countdown for you. This great post on Digital Inspiration explains how to pose your query correctly.
Link Clump
If you find a great list of sites you want to copy, or you want to save every link on a results page, link clump can help. After a simple install in Chrome, a right click and drag enables you to either copy or open every link you highlight. You can also customize this movement under the settings so that you must press down a letter in addition to your right click and drag.
SEO Site Tools
As the name implies this plugin for Chrome is a one stop shop for useful information. It will show the PR of the page, homepage, meta description, SEMRush traffic, Alexa rank and more in a simple drop down.
SEOTools for Excel
If you have a little bit of time to devote to our underutilized tool, Microsoft Excel, you can end up with a pile of information worth using. With this tool, as clunky and slow as it may be in the beginning, you can import analytics data, monitor backlinks and do domain research on a set of sites right in Excel with internet access to your computer.
Scraper Tool
If you’ve found a super great resource list, but want to save it into a spreadsheet, Scraper tool is the way to go. All you need to do is right click and choose “scrape similar”and all the links on the page are ready to be exported.
List Comparison Tool
If you’ve compiled a list of great resources, but think there may be some crossover, pasting both lists onto this simple and easy to use resource can solve all of your problems!
Links API Extension for Excel
With this tool you can “unlock the incredible capabilities of SEOmoz’s Mozscape API, SEOgadget’s Links API & Majestic SEO directly within Excel using the SEOgadget Links API extension for Excel”. Just don’t forget the rest of us when your site is ranking number one for every keyword!
Author: Brynna Baldauf
Courtesy: www.verticalmeasures.com