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Let’s be clear about this, building links is not as simple as firing a silver bullet. There is no one, single link builder tool on the market that will be a cure-all to help you reach the holy grail of the number one in Google’s search results. What exists are plenty of tools that can help you research, analyse and implement your SEO strategy – and a successful strategy is one that is as unique as your business. Here, we’ve put together our favourite list of link builder tools that could help you build high-quality effective links.

Some of Our Favourite Link Builder Tools and Strategies

1. Research the Competition

MozPro Open Site Explorer

It’s all too easy to imagine that SEO is all about a complicated alchemy but the truth is that a simple approach using the right link building tools can often deliver everything you need to know. If you know who your competition is and they are ranking well then why reinvent the wheel? With optimised and targeted research, you can find out what is working for your competitors and put it to use with your own domain.

You can use MozPro’s Open Site Explorer to check backlinks is a powerful but simple link building tool that analyses backlink data and returns a range of detailed reports that allow you to apply the same methods of link building.

Majestic SEO

A similar tool to Moz Pro, Majestic SEO is another useful way to research the competition and to report on your own domains. With Majestic SEO, not only can you check referring domains, NoFollows and redirects but you can also download informative data on unique links and anchor text for your own site as well as those of your competitors.

If you verify ownership of your domain then the information gets more powerful and Majestic SEO even offers a daily report on all new inbound links.

The important part of Majestic’s arsenal of tools for linkbuilding research is their unique authority algorithm which gives users an idea of how valuable a link is using two vectors; citation flow and trust flow.

2. Domain Profiling

URL Profiler

This extremely powerful tool has only recently hit the market and offers a high-level analysis of multiple URLs. With URL Profiler, you can run reports on domain level data and URL level data and include metrics such as:

• Readability
• Copyscape
• Duplicate content
• Page speed
• Search analytics
• Google analytics
• Google indexation

The system can return information from Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs and various other link analysis tools as well.

With URL profiler, you can thoroughly research your link data using multiple tools and metrics as well as run audits on your backlinks.

HubSpot Website Grader

Another tool for assessing a potential domain is the Website Grader from HubSpot and it’s free. Using a range of metrics to produce their own unique SEO score, you simply input a domain name to receive an instant rating out of 100. This is made up of several components, each of which you can drill down into to receive further information. Performance, SEO and security are all assessed along with the domains mobile optimisation levels and returns some basic, top-level detail.

A free 30-day trial allows you to drill down into these components and gather more information that is useful for producing an SEO snapshot of a domain. The detailed reports provide data on:

• Number of inbound links with full analysis.
• Google PageRank with details of indexed pages.
• Competition analysis.

3. Keyword Research

LongTail Pro

Whether it’s content or backlinks that is driving your SEO strategy, keywords are an essential part of your success. Far too many sites achieve limited reach because they have failed to research keywords correctly and/or are not using longtail keywords.

With LongTailPro, you can direct your keyword research into the 70% of the search engine market that many of your competitors aren’t using; long tail keywords. With just a few seed keywords, LongTailPro generates hundreds of suggestions using your domain and those of your competitors. The level of analysis is incredibly deep and provides useful information search volumes, cost per click and competitiveness of keywords.

To build backlinks that perform well, you need to use optimum keywords for your anchor text and LongTailPro can help you do this.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Calculating traffic potential for keywords can be a tricky, but is an essential, part of how to build quality links. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer allows you to discover the best keywords to use or that your competition is already using. With thousands of suitable suggestions for alternative keywords, the software gives advanced metrics to maximise the potential of ‘low hanging fruit’.

You can use the tool to analyse the performance of your own keywords, those of your competition and any target sites that you are looking to build backlinks with.

4. Resource Page Link Building

One of the most under-utilised ways of building links is to get a mention the ‘Resources’ section of a site (obviously, one with a good domain authority). However, finding these sites can be a time consuming affair. Fortunately, there are tools that can help.

ScrapeBox

This tool has a ‘grey’ reputation in the SEO community as there are elements of its software that are decidedly Black Hat. However, ScrapeBox is an incredibly powerful tool and can be used for White Hat SEO purposes, as long as you use it for research and not for auto-commenting.

By using one of the terms intitle:resources, inURL:resources or inURL:links in conjunction with your keywords, the software can return a huge range of potential prospects for getting a backlink from. You can even filter and order the results using the useful page ranking feature so that you can prioritise those sites with good authority.

Hunter

Once you have the URL’s, you can use Hunter to help you find the right contact details. By inputting a domain, this useful tool will deliver verified email addresses that you can use. A free account will give you 150 searches a month.

5. Prospecting for Links

Busy marketers will know that prospecting for links can be a time-consuming affair and managing all of those outreach requests can quickly become an exercise in chasing your own tail.

Ontolo

Ontolo offers the answer to managing all aspects of linkbuilding prospect management. From managing huge volumes of contact data across social media, custom uploads and contact URLs to monitoring and reporting on community engagement, this powerful management tool has it all.

A versatile, fast and easy to use system, Ontolo allows you to perform thorough research into your target link building areas and delivers the tools to prospect them more efficiently. And, as a cross-platform tool, Ontolo accepts data from inputs created by Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs so you can amalgamate data from your other linkbuilding tools.

SEO Spyglass from Link Assistant

This tool from SEO Spyglass is used by some big names including Audi, Hewlett Packard and Intel. The software works by researching opportunities for link building across the 10 most common mechanisms:

• Guest posting
• Commenting
• Forums
• Links Submissions Forms
• Topical Blogs
• Reviews
• Giveaways
• Link Pages
• Directories
• Competitor Backlinks

The information returned is very powerful and allows you to sort the prospects by domain authority, number of backlinks or anchor texts. Contact details are gathered automatically meaning the process of reaching out is fast and simple. It even incorporates tracking software so you can stay on top of your communications. Link Assistant offers plenty of other features but perhaps one of the more useful features is the one-click link verification report which allows you to check for broken links, changes to nofollow or incorrect anchors.

6. Blogger Outreach

InkyBee

A subscription service that helps you to identify bloggers and their blogs in any given niche, InkyBee utilises data sourced from Moz to provide information about the domain authority of each potential outreach candidate.

Used in conjunction with a well-planned blogger outreach strategy, InkyBee can help you establish the right network of influencers to grow your backlinks successfully.

Buzz Stream

This effective and powerful outreach management platform from Buzz Stream allows you to research prospects for your backlinks, provides detailed analysis of the domain’s authority, social media following and even provides contact details for you. Using Buzz Stream gives you a central database to manage the contact you make.

4. Technical Audits

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool is a useful piece of software for auditing your site for broken links, page errors, checking key SEO metrics as well as researching anchor text from your competitor’s sites. It’s one of a number of ways to check backlinks from the competition.

Maintaining the general health of your website is critical to ensure that your rise to the top of the page rankings keeps its momentum.

Raven SEO Tools

Raven SEO Tools uses data from a wide range of sources including Google AdWords, Facebook and Twitter to supplement the information taken from Google Analytics. The information provided is therefore a comprehensive snapshot of the performance of your domain in relation to SEO, linkbuilding and even PPC. You can even set up automatic reporting so that you receive alerts on link status and link quality.

The suite of tools can allow you to create incredibly powerful reports based on social and research integrations in addition to CRM links. Completing an audit with Raven SEO Tools is simple and provides detailed crawl information to help optimise your site – you can even run audits on your competition.

Find out more at Opace

To find out more about which link builder tools we use here at Opace to optimise your SEO strategy, contact Opace online or on 0845 017 7661.