Getting inbound links to your site is one of the most important aspects of effective SEO (search engine optimization) practice. Link building tools can make your life a lot easier when you’re trying to structure your site to make it favorable in the eyes of the search engines. Each tool offers different value but here are a few that can help you out.
Analysis tools can tell you how many links point to a specific page or domain and/or which anchor text is being used significantly or even too much. These types of tools can give you a quick, superficial look at the status of websites but you’ll need some others to peform a more in-depth analysis.
SearchStatus is a group of features offered in a single Firefox plugin. It can provide you with useful information, such as Google Toolbar PageRank, page- and domain links through the Yahoo SiteExplorer, WhoIs information, Google’s cache of the page you’re visiting, an on-page link report and Archive.org. Another very useful trick that SearchStatus offors is the option to highlight all nofollow links which can definitely come in handy when you’re building links.
Another of the useful link building tools is LinkDiagnosis. This exists as a web based tool and a Firefox plugin. This one is similar to the Yahoo SiteExplorer except it attempts to filter out all low quality links, offers you a list of common anchor texts, and tries to show you a list with the most visited and popular pages of the domain you’re investigating. One great feature of LinkDiagnosis is that you can download the data it provides you as a csv file. . .extremely useful. Keep in mind when using this tool that an analysis of a larger site will take more time. A small site may only take a few seconds but a more content/page filled site could take up to 30 minutes.
If you need even more detailed data, you might want to look for tools that demonstrate link building efforts, structures and/or a history of the site. This kind of information can be helpful when you are trying to optimize your own website or that of a competitor.
SEOmoz’s Linkscape and MajesticSEO attempt to create the most complete index possible of the web for SEO purposes. Linkscape is considered more user-friendly while Majestic gets you a wider range of data which can also be downloaded.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is another excellent tool for on-site analysis. It acts as a search engine crawler and checks websites for broken links and displays a continuously updated list of URLs, which you can sort by different criteria. Link Sleuth is a good way to get a look at your own website and to evaluate your internal link structure as well. And you can run reports on websites that you’re considering getting links from to see what holes they may have in their site that you could possibly fill.
There are many link building tools to choose from. Hopefully these can get you started on the right foot.
