The Best Link Building Tools By Experts Choice

Think you need dozens of tools for link building? Think again. I asked 60 Solopreneur, SEO Experts, Copywriters and Bloggers a simple question:

“If you could only use 3 SEO Tools for your link building campaigns which 3 would you choose?”

I wanted to know plain and simple which tools I must seriously consider and what I can live without.

As a newbie blogger I’ve been overwhelmed by all the top 10, 20 and even 100 lists that have got me nowhere closer to choosing a manageable selection of tools. That’s why I decided the only way to know for real was to ask the experts and see if the best tools in the industry would indeed reveal themselves.

Read on to discover each expert’s favorite 3 SEO Tools along with their awesome tips on how to use them! You can either skip to your favorite expert using these quick links or grab a coffee, get comfortable and commence scrolling!

60 SEO Experts Reveal 3 Favourite Link Building Tools

Neil Patel
Majestic SEO,  Scrapebox and Open Site Explorer.

Pawel Grabowski
BuzzStream – Great tool for blogger outreach and prospecting management. Think of it as your link building CRM with research tools built in (my personal definition of it of course :)). A tool I simply can’t live without. Oh, an important thing, their support is absolutely magnificent. One of the best I have ever seen.

Link Prospector by Citation Labs – A tool for finding link building opportunities. It’s fast, super easy to use and can find plenty of great websites you can build links from. Although as with any tool of that type, the results you get largely depend on what information you put in first (just thought I’d mention).

Rank Tracker – Perhaps not the most ideal tool but the one I use so thought I’d include it here too. It’s good for checking out your rankings but since it runs from your local machine, make sure that you use some sort of proxy or VPN if you want to check results from other location than yours.

Brian Dean
Good question ahrefs buzzstream and excel not sure if MS office is on Twitter.

Aleyda Solis
I really like Buzzstream, CognitiveSEO & Link prospector.

Amal Rafeeq
I think I’ll be going with Alexa. It records backlinks more quickly than others I think. And I recommend you NOT TO care much about the backlinks and Social Shares. Just continue what you are doing, produce great content and natural links will flow to you.

Chris Dyson
my top LB tools Scrapebox ahrefs & followerwonk

Miguel Salcido
First off, 3 tools is tough! Link building is so dynamic and encompasses so much. But if I had to only live with 3 tools for link building they would have to be Link Prospector, Google Docs, and BuzzStream.

Google Docs is just invaluable for things like organization, collaboration, and data management. What I mean by data management is being able to slice and dice data for different URLs or links and pull in metrics, contact info, etc. There are also tons of great tools built in Google Docs that one can leverage to generate content ideas and search queries.

Link Prospector is great for quickly developing lists of potential link targets whether it’s guest blogging, niche directories, contests, etc. This tool, I could not live without! It does what many of us had to do manually for years in terms of finding link prospects. It’s also extremely affordable and pays for itself easily.

And Buzzstream is useful for contact management, task management, and finding contact information. You can get alot with the paid version, but their free tools are excellent as well! You can use their free tools to find contact information, generate search queries, build lists, etc.

With these three tools one can build a very successful link building campaign that can last as long as you can keep working.

Adam Connell
BuzzStream – this is an essential part of our process at UK Linkology. It allows us to manage large guest posting campaigns with ease, track links and social mentions – even prospect for link building opportunities. The built in CRM is perfect for link building and it makes what can easily spiral out of control into something that’s easily managable.

Ahrefs – I use a couple of different sources for examining link profiles, but Ahrefs has got some really impressive tools that make it stand out… the way they break down anchor text into different numbered terms makes identifying issues very easy.

The crawler comes in handy, along with the mentions and batch analysis tools. The graphs it spits out come in handy for reports too.

Advanced Web Ranking – I’ve tested a lot of rank tracking tools and I know that tracking rankings is really difficult, lots of factors involved but you still need a bench mark – this bench mark will help you identify possible issues in the future.

I’ve tried desktop and online based tools to track rankings and I’ve had problems across the board – lack of features, poor reporting but AWR does everything that I need with some crawling and site evaluation tools too.

Paddy Moogan
BuzzStream – most people know that I’m a big fan of BuzzStream, it has so many uses but ultimately, it lets you scale link building in the right way because you build up your “black book” of link building contacts which can help you get more and more links the more you use the system. It also does a great job of pulling in link metrics so you can do quick link analysis tool

Followerwonk – I like link prospecting with Followerwonk because it lets you find true influencers in an industry which means that if you can build a relationship with them, the value goes far beyond just a link.

Google – you can find all the link prospects you’ll ever need by learning how to use Google properly. It sounds basic but you often don’t need fancy tools to scrape Google for you, you can get much more granular by refining your own queries quickly and pulling in the results manually than having to rerun tools.

Andy Crestodina
Links happen when great content becomes visible to someone who creates links. Who creates links? Writers, bloggers, editors, journalists, podcasters and event organizers. In other words, the trick to link building is to create visibility among creators.

So here are three networking tools that can be used for link building. I recommend these tools because they focus on research.

FollowerWonk, InkyBee, and Topsy.

Silicon Beach
to be different Twitter outreach photoshop creating content & feedly keeping track of target blogs for engament

Jon Dykstra
My 3 most-often used tools are:
Google Keyword Tool – I have Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro, but tend to use GKT the most.

Google Trends

Camtasia Video Screen Capture – I make tons of videos and transcribe them. It’s one of my favorite content-generation methods these days… plus I put the videos on YouTube.

Ann Smarty
MyBlogGuest, BuzzStream and Google search

Iness Bokhan
As for the 3 SEO tools I’d use for link building, I’ll probably pick the following ones:

1. SEO Spyglass – the tool has a huge database that gets regularly updated and it brings back the unlimited number of backlinks and analyzes top backlink page factors (PR, age, Alexa, anchor text, etc.).

2. Google Analytics – pretty obvious, but still, this is the tool I keep open in the browser tabs most of the time.

3. The SeoQuake plugin for Firefox – for instant analysis of potential backlink pages.

Chris Ainsworth
My answer would depend upon the purpose for your link building tools. If you’re looking for link analysis tools in the post-Penguin era then personally I would have to say:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Ahrefs
3. Link Detox If you’re looking for actual link building tools (i.e. automated tools) then don’t!

Otherwise if you’re looking for tools to help with the placement of links (i.e. identification of a trustworthy domain) then there are an array of tools such as Archive.org, WHOis, Majestic SEO etc which will help to establish the history of a domain.

My answer would depend on your goal for the tools but getting it down to just 3 may be a problem. Any SEO with clout will advise using an array of tools to ensure you obtain the widest overview possible. I hope that helps.

Tim Grice
response source, follwerwonk and Google That's for link building, link analysis is a different story.

Gabriella Sannino
One thing that’s apparent, if you’re paying attention to the changes occurring in SEO: it’s more than analytics, technical and content strategies – it’s about human behavior, too. How are people making those connections? The easiest and most time consuming way is earning links. That is important for SEO. Actually it’s two-fold process.

The first and most important reason is the connections you make outside your digital footprint that reinforce and add value to your readers. The second reason of course, is that search engines use those signals. Yes, search engines view links as part of the authority given to your web presence and will continue to do so, while updating algorithms that combat crappy links.

I’m sure you’ve seen those comments people make. “Google is ranking company xyz better than ours, yet our content is better.” I get it, really I do. But at the end of the day, allowing Google to dictate your day-to-day operations is like being a hostage with no clarity for your future. Let me be clear, ranking should not become your Holy Grail. Contradiction much you say? Sure, but at the end of the day ask yourself who’s buying from you? I’m pretty sure you’ll agree it’s not Google.

Maybe you should add earning links as your top must do in 2015. It’s an organic process and yes, its time consuming but when done organically it’s like a facelift, it becomes ageless. At least for the next 3-5 years LOL. Which when you consider how long a strong organic link lasts, the odds are for you, and not against you.

Below are my top three organic link-building tools. Each one offers a variety of options that will not only help with your organic efforts, but that will point you in the direction of “where” you should look first.

Link Prospector from Whitespark, Google Webmaster Tools and Majestic SEO.

Gregory Ciotti
For the sake of being different, I’ll try to include a few of the less obvious options.

Yesware – I’ve written thousands of words about email outreach and networking over email and if there is one tool I can’t live without, it’s this. Reminders, tracking, customizable templates, it’s got everything a link builder needs for email.

Ahrefs – Simply put, the premier tool for checking links. Their mentions tracker is also highly underrated.

AuthorityLabs – Instead of wasting time tracking the results of your linkbuilding, tools like AuthorityLabs let you get an overview of your current rankings quickly so you can go back to (surprise!) building more great links.

Geoff Kenyon
Link Prospector: The Link Prospector by Citation Labs is a great tool for finding outreach targets – it’s easy to use, fast, and while you can use advanced search queries in Google, this scales a lot better making it a much more efficient way to do your prospecting.

Open Site Explorer API: Once you have your prospects from Link Prospector, you have to determine which targets you should pursue as not all sites and links are equal. The OSE API provides a fast way to do this. There have been several posts written about using gdocs to access the API, but the best way is to use Pyscape.

Additionally, OSE (and Pyscape) are great for doing competitive analysis so that you can determine where to concentrate your efforts.

Google Analytics: Your analytics is ultimately what you need to turn to in order to determine how effective your link building is (You don’t have to use Google Analytics, I just like GA, more on that here). Rankings don’t matter, your organic traffic and your revenue matter so it’s important to spend more time in your analytics, understanding what’s happening on your site rather than checking ranking reports.

Chris Antoni
3 Essentials to my link building:

Community Specific Forums, YouTube, and Guest Posts.

I don’t need no stinking tools! Just playing with you, but that is my real answer.

Matt McGee
I can give you one tool: Help A Reporter Out , also known as HARO. It’s a great place to discover journalists and writers that are looking for expert sources, and then reach out to them to be interviewed for their reporting needs. That can lead to great mentions and links from trusted websites — so-called “editorial” links that are given freely and seem to be highly valued by Google. Hope that helps. I don’t do “traditional” link building anymore, just PR/outreach like I’ve described above.

Mauro D’Andrea
I love Long Tail Pro. You can integrate it with your Moz free account so that you’ll have the chance to analyze your competitors and their links pretty easily. Other than links you can check site age, domain authority, page authority and page rank of many sites at a glance.

Open Site Explorer is another powerful tool. It gives you many insights about links pointing to a certain page.

As a third tool, I’d think about Microsoft Excel, or other similar softwares (even though it isn’t really a SEO tool). With it you can track your link building strategy, your search engine rankings, your keywords, important websites and email contacts.

Mike Essex 
Majestic SEO: Fantastic for checking which links have been received and analysing competitor strategies

Gorkana / HARO: Both great ways to see active PR queries that journalists need help with

TweetDeck: I add lists of journalists on Twitter so I can see whenever they have questions and can interact with them, building long term connections

Bill Hunt
Google Webmaster Tools – to find broken and misdirected links often to the home page.

Majestic SEO – for bulk links and drill down in link value.

Link Research Tools – primarily for their Link Detox tools to weed out bad and old links.

Nick Eubanks
hmm tough one, I would say SERP IQ, ahrefs, and buzzstream.

Anthony Mangia
I love the Moz Keyword Analysis tool. I don’t think there’s a better tool on the market to quickly analyze the SERPs and really look at how competitive a given keyword will be to rank for. The interface is slicker than ever with the re-brand from SEOmoz to Moz, and their Full Reports are as in-depth as it gets. I use this tool a ton when I’m prospecting for new niches to enter when building websites for myself.

GroupHigh is my favorite blogger outreach tool. It’s Buzzstream’s slicker, more powerful, much more expensive older brother, but I think it’s worth every penny for some of my larger clients. Being able to mass import URLs by the thousands and pull down basic blog information, SEO and traffic metrics, social networking stats and even things like whether or not the blogger normally runs giveaways/guest posts/sponsored posts makes prospecting for new blogger connections a breeze.

Evernote isn’t really an SEO tool, per se, but it is my whole life. I use Evernote to organize any and all information relating to various clients and websites I own, including notes, to-do’s, new content and any important files. This allows me to access the files I need from any device, whether I’m at my apartment, at a client’s office, or on the road.

My favorite feature of Evernote, however, has to be the Clearly extension. Whenever I see an article on Inbound.org that I know I want to read, I just hit the Clearly button and the content of the article gets scraped and saved to my Evernote account in a clean, easy-to-read format that I can access offline on my iPad, which makes my Subway rides a million times more productive.

Zac Johnson
Three tools that I like to use are:

Google Keyword Tool – always a good resource for people just starting out and don’t have money to spend on premium services.

Serpfox – a nice little site that keeps me updated with all of my site rankings and movement.

Long Tail Pro – an awesome software application that provides deep research and numbers or finding winning keywords.

Jason Acidre
SEOquake, Google Search and Ahrefs.

Nicole Beckett
One tool would definitely be Open Site Explorer. Some of the best SEO advice I ever got was ridiculously-simple — Google your target keywords, and see what kind of links the top 3 results have. Then, try to get links from the same places (like publishing a guest post on the same blog, etc.). It’s easy to do with Open Site Explorer and it really works!

Another tool I use is Google’s “sites like” option to find guest blogging opportunities. For example, I have alot of articles published on Site Pro News, but I’m always looking for similar sites that I can contribute to. The “sites like” option has helped me find websites that I may never have found on my own.

I think those are the only 2 tools I really use. Since SEO has changed so much over the past few years, I’ve focused more and more on other opportunities (like guest blogging and even *quality* forums that I can join and build relationships on — not just drop a link on). Luckily, I’ve gotten some great exposure AND some really great links in the process!

Kane Jamison
In a hypothetical world where I only get 3 tools, the best answer to this question will always be the following:

1. An email client
2. A Google search box
3. A spreadsheet to track it all

I think the smartest link builders would argue that a phone is just as good as an email client. That said, linkprospector.citationlabs.com is the one paid tool I wouldn’t give up – it greatly speeds up the prospecting process. After that, OSE & BuzzStream are the next best additions to our toolset.

Darren Paterson
Personally, I find the following three tools to be the most important and potentially invaluable in terms of my day to day activities and “tools for your offsite link building campaigns”:

Open Site Explorer – There is really no need to explain in detail why and how we utilise OSE, but mainly the ability to download and manipulate backlink profiles for both clients and competitors is quick and simple.

Ahrefs – I have found Ahrefs to be a great secondary tool, which provides a lot of data, which is easily accessible, which otherwise would involve hours of work when using OSE. For example, anchor text distribution graphs are automatically created and require no additional work when entering a URL into Ahrefs.

Google Webmaster Tools – Although not necessarily within the “tools for your offsite link building campaigns”, it has to be one of the main tools I use day-to-day. A lot of my my time, especially within the last few months, has been focussing on identifying measurable backlink data. Therefore utilising the the ability to download ‘discovered’ backlinks over the last few years is incredibly useful. Especially when conducting backlink audits for new and potential clients.

Bill Sebald
BuzzStream would be my first. My love for BuzzStream knows no bounds.

Second would be RankRanger, a daily rank tracker with a lot of different metrics and a great whitelabel option. This is a big time saver with clients

Third is the Web Developer plugin for Chrome and Firefox. I use it all the time for audits.

Marcus Taylor
The three SEO tools I use the most (besides the really common ones) are SEMRush, URLprofiler, and Screaming Frog.

While SEMRush has a lot of cool features, I’m a particularly big fan of their site audit feature, which tends to flag a lot of site issues missed by Google Webmaster Tools and Screaming Frog.

On top of this, the competitive data that you can get from SEMRush is extremely useful when doing competitor analysis, and a (surprisingly) accurate way of seeing which keywords are generating the most traffic for a given site.

URLProfiler is one of my favourite tools for scraping link data, as it collects data through Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs’ APIs, and then allows you to export the information with a lot of control over different filters.

Finally, Screaming Frog is my go to tool for getting a birds eye view snapshot of a website’s onsite structure and general health. It’s also particularly useful when you need to get a snapshot of all of a site’s title tags and meta information, along with the character length of each.

Bob Jones
Raven Tools – The link manager is an essential part of our daily link building hustle.

Majestic SEO – Although we also use OSE from Moz and Ahrefs, Majestic seems to have the right type of functionality for us when it comes to competitive research.

Google – This includes GWT but also Google.com itself. Learn all about advanced search operators and you’ll be able to find fantastic link opportunities if you do it right.

Samuel King
My 3 top tools are:

Google Analytics – This is the only tool I need to evaluate campaigns, track conversions and monitor set KPIs.

Google Webmaster Tools – Another google tool. Tells me what is going on with links.

Raven Tools – A very robust SEO assistant that pulls in data from multiple sources.

Chris Gilchrist
I don’t have time to explain all the choices but, Majestic SEO, BuzzStream and Screaming Frog.

James Agate
Very quickly… Google Docs, Trello, and Link Prospector.

Carrie Hil
My 3 go-to tools for linkbuilding are:

Raven Tools – their Backlink explorer and link manager are awesome.

Open Site Explorer – you don’t need both Raven and OSE, but if you have them, they’re great!

HARO – Help A Reporter Out service looks for niche experts to provide info to reporters and journalists. A great resource for certain businesses looking to get the word out.

Harris Schachter
I love following tools:

Ahrefs domain comparison. I’ve always been a fan of Ahrefs and this tool tucked away in the site is no different. With it, you can compare up to 4 of your competitors alongside your own domain. It presents very useful data, including link and referring domain counts, backlink sources, TLD types, link types, authority metrics, social lovin’ and more.

You can quickly size up the competition with this, before diving into the individual sites. Once you identify some top performers, you can then go into the main section of Ahrefs and export all their links and pivot in Excel to find some great opportunities which your competition has but you might not.

Browser Addon/Plugins. I know this is kind of cheating because it’s more than one tool, but the Moz Bar, Check My Links, Web Developer Plugin, and some handy bookmarklets are too crucial not to mention.

LinkRisk. Simply put, you can’t grow a garden without pruning some things here or there. I got in during the beta, but I’ve really been digging on LinkRisk. It does a great job of identifying bad and risky links which you might want to consider disavowing or removing.

For sites with a ton of backlinks, this tool saves a lot of time and can also serve as validation for your own opinions about the quality of links, as sometimes this type of judgement can be subjective. I love that you can take an ahrefs or Majestic export and plug it right in, identify different classes of risk and then automatically export a disavow file. It’s simple, useful and plays nice with other tools I already use.

Rhea Drysdale
Majestic SEO, Screaming Frog, and Google Webmaster Tools.

Nathan Rossow
There are a few tools that I use in my day to day work. My Top 3 are LongTail Pro, Moz Pro, and Bright Local.

Sohel Parvez
I love Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Majestic and Open Site Explorer.

Gianluca Fiorelli
The tools I would use – and that I actually use – are:

BuzzStream, which is the state of art CRM for link builders. It solves tons of time consuming tasks so you can spend your time for what it counts: outreach.

Majestic SEO/OSE, for finding opportunities and doing competitive analysis.

Followerwonk, because I consider that the best way of doing link building is targeting your audience well – its tastes, dislikes et al – but especially analyzing those ones who influence your audience. Try to understand what they like, what they share, from what sites and create that kind of content and target the sites they read and share things from, because it works!

Philip Bryant
My top three SEO tools for linkbuilding would have to be: Majestic SEO, BuzzStream and Google Advanced Search Operators.

Debra Mastaler
Hub Finder from SEOBook – Finds co-occurring sites. Link Detective – Analyzes back links by type and Social Crawlytics – Identifies most shared content.

Sean Stahlman
Three link building tools I can’t live without? While I use BuzzStream for management, I think there is some great value in the following tools. With the recent Google updates, I’m spending significantly more time for clients auditing link profiles and cleaning them up before earning them some great value.

Screaming Frog – I use this for anything from site audits, detailed backlink analysis, redirect mapping and so much more. Pair it up with data exported from other tools and it’s a massive time saver. You also can’t beat the customer service that Dan delivers!

Majestic SEO – I know there are a variety of 3rd party link tools available but Majestic has always been one of my favorite sources. It’s affordable, fast and provides the majority of information I’m looking for. That doesn’t mean I don’t still leverage OSE, FWE or other tools for some missing components.

Google/Bing Webmaster Tools – Free information directly from search crawlers! Regardless if some data (links) is not entirely complete, I think it’s extremely valuable to know how crawlers are interacting with your site, how their index matches up with the actual amount of content you are presenting and what roadblocks are being encountered. While I wish the link data from Google was more accurate, I’m happy to have a fairly solid starting point for reviewing potential threats.

George Stevens
I’d probably say:
1) Google Webmaster Tools – gives you your fundamentals – a place to check how Google is looking at your website. Also one of the best lists of backlinks you can get – links that tools like MajesticSEO and Open Site Explorer don’t pick up. I’ve found link lists in Webmaster particularly useful for combating negative SEO.

2) Majestic SEO – I prefer MajesticSEO to Open Site Explorer. I use this for lots of backlink profile metrics.

3) Moz (SEOmoz) – wide selection of tools to help with SEO. E.g. checks websites for errors and issues and gives keyword competition.

Joel Widmer
My top 3 are: Open Site Explorer, BuzzStream and SEO Toolbar by Moz.

Sebastian Cowie
Top 3 Tools / Sites for me:
Ahrefs – Invaluable and definitely the leader of the pack when it comes to backlink data and competitor research.

Scrapebox – Too many tools to list, but it’s basically got everything you could ever need for data collection, scraping, rank tracking… the list goes on.

Google Webmaster Tools – Great at detecting issues and the backlink data is definitely more accurate and inclusive. Also offers insight into key term visibility and effectively does your keyword research for you.

Nick LeRoy
The three SEO Tools I rely on the most are Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO and good ol Google Docs. I like OSE and MajesticSEO as tools to do competitor research. Not only is it good to find links going to their websites but also other websites the sites link out to which might be relevant for me to hit up in the future.

After that i am a purist — i like google docs and excel spreadsheets. I’ll simply keep a list of what site i’ve reached out to, dates, domain value (seomoz metrics & PR) and relevance. I also utilize this spreadsheet as a little black book in case any of these websites i’ve received a link before are relevant for future projects! It’s as simple as that for me. No fancy tools in my arsenal!

Ryan McLaughlin
BuzzStream – Every time I discover a new opportunity, I immediately click my Buzzmarker in order to get it queued up in this tool. As someone that really appreciates easy organization, BuzzStream is a lifesaver.

Open Site Explorer – Of course, for backlink research everyone has their preference (whether it be OSE, Majestic, ahrefs). Personally I use all of them, but my “go to” is usually OSE. The export of competitor’s backlink profiles in order to identify their top links is one of my first things I check.

Google Search – Advanced queries in the big G are invaluable to the link building process.

Simon Penson
BuzzStream, Ahrefs, our tool for finding influencers

Peter Attia
It would depend on many factors including the type and scale of link building. I’ll focus on traditional outreach link building, as I feel that’s what most people are seeking. However, the scale of link building is still a factor here. For example, if I was working with a high budget business with a team of link builders who are getting as many links as they can, all day every day, I would say:

BuzzStream – To keep track of who got a link where (so two link builders don’t approach the same person) and to churn out outreach emails more efficiently.

Ahrefs – To keep track of my back link profile and make sure things look organic and healthy.

Excel – To organize everything properly, keep track of budgets, and assess which terms to go after moving forward.

For a low budget business that is trying to get a small amount of high quality links, I would say: Followerwonk – To find higher quality candidates with healthy social profiles. Ahrefs – For competitive analysis and to see if I can mine some higher quality leads from competitors. Boomerang – To make sure I send out a follow up email if I don’t get a response from someone.

Sujan Patel
My favorite tools are: Open Site Explorer – Finding the competition’s links. Ontolo – building a contact list and Cognitive SEO – for link cleanup and removal. Because these days everyone needs to remove a few links.

Wiep Knol
If I could use only three, it would probably be: Majestic SEO (for raw data) Cognitive SEO (for detailed analysis) BuzzStream (for campaign management).

Dan Stelter
As a copywriter, I don’t get into the SEO side of things too extensively, but some concepts, like keyword research and on-page optimization, are critically important for my copy to succeed. I use some tools to check SEO health too, but when I’m talking about SEO, I’m more discussing tools I use for keyword research etc…

1. SEMrush – I use this tool mostly for keyword research. You don’t even need the paid version. Basically, you can type in competing domains and see the exact keywords they’re targeting, as well as where they rank for those keywords. It works great for generating ideas.

2. SeoQuake toolbar – This toolbar is pretty awesome for checking competition. It gives critical stats like domain age and page rank of the pages you that show up in Google’s SERPs. This information is vitally important for me to have when determining which pages and keywords to target when designing clients’ or my own websites.

3. My own eyeballs – I use these because Google wants to give the best rankings to websites that provide the best user experience. That can only be judged by looking at the site yourself. About 80% of the guest post requests I get come from spammy, awful websites I’d never link to. The same goes if I’m guest posting on someone else’s website – I know I’ll get the best SEO value if the site has great content and comes across as a credible resource.

Sanket Patel
Three tools which i use always are:

BuzzStream – As far as finding good link prospects is concerned, I love this tool. I have made many channels through this tool and recently have added one more to have a far and wide reach to bloggers. I have been able to pick microinfluencers having conversations about their products. This software really helps me in finding better opportunities easily.

Moz – The best thing i like about this tool is the toolbar provided by Moz Community. It gives us a bunch of SEO metrics in few seconds. I am able to evaluate many things for the initial start-up of the web promotion. I love other stuff too, like OSE for link analysis, Onpage checklist analysis and recently added Followerwonk for twitter analysis and many more tools which enables quick tasking. All Moz tool makes your workflow easy at the end.

IFTTT – If you are running social media campaign then do not forget to add IFTTT. You will get powerful connection through normal triggers via ‘if’ & ‘then’ statements. There are 57 channels which are associated to this tool. I have setup the same for youtube, twitter and many more channels and i am getting quick reactions through those trigger which i have set already. It becomes easy to measure all social signals from one easy platform.

Lyndon Antcliff
Email, Twitter and occasionally the free Moz bar.

I am a content based linkbuilder, a buzz marketing, newsjacking, linkbaiting type. I no longer care about seo as such. Don’t get me wrong it’s certainly not dead and never will be. But the aim of the game is to get links, improve brand awareness and improve customer base.

The three tools I mention are what I could not do without, although most will not think that Email and Twitter are a tool, but that is how I use them. My experience tells me what I need to know about a website these days. Few tools can replicate that

Dan Petrovic
There are many great tools which my team uses for link building and link management. This includes Majestic, Raven, Moz, BuzzStream, Ontolo and recently we’ve been looking at Cognitive SEO as well. But since the question is about what I use I’ll have to go off the beaten path, so I hope it won’t disappoint.

Google Webmaster Tools: I’ve built so much functionality around Google Webmaster Tools data that I would find it really uncomfortable to plan my campaigns without it. Before I create an outline for a link building campaign I look at the pages that have already attracted natural links and ask a question: “What made this content linkworthy?”.

Once I answer that question I can then plan content creation strategy and then focus on outreach. Google Webmaster Tools also helps me prioritise which type of content and keywords are worth targeting. I even built a custom tool which helps me crunch all the Webmaster Tools numbers and streamline the decision making process.

Fresh Link Finder: I try to keep link creation process as organic as possible and for this reason I’ve built a tool which helps me track natural links as they happen. Fresh Link Finder analyses three link sources: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytcis and server log files. It’s also capable of tracking referrer string data with .js much like Google Analytics code.

I log in daily and observe what content has attracted links and the quality of links generated. This allows me to connect with fans, build new relationships and credit those who link to me. From time to time I’ll have an opportunity to correct a link or in rare cases request a removal (if I feel the link is a risk to our link profile). One fun thing is that I can tell that I will get a link from an article before the article goes live (e.g. blogger clicks the link in a post draft before publishing the story).

Muil: Link building is relationship building. I like to start with my existing connections to source links from, rather than begging for links form complete strangers. What better place to start with than your own followers on Twitter? I drop my Twitter username in Muil and it gives me a list of users and their websites/blogs in a CSV file.

For me that’s a great starting point when building links through relationships. Of course you wouldn’t spam people all at once as social outreach works best when applied on an individual level.

Chris Higgins
As a marketing agency we are fortunate to have access to a whole host of cool tools and pieces of software to help us with our day to day tasks.

They all do their job really well, but I definitely have my favourite and as you may expect these are the ones I use most often at all stages of a client’s campaign, from inception through to ongoing monthly delivery.

SEMrush, Ahrefs and LinkRisk.

If you could only use 3 tools for your link building campaigns which 3 SEO Tools would you choose?

The Philosophy Behind Link Building

Among Internet Marketer, there seems to have controversy when it comes to baclinks, link building strategies & it's importance. if you ask a group of online marketer, What is a backlink?, Why are backlinks So Useful?, How do search engines evaluate backlinks?, importance of backlinks in seo? link earning, etc you'll get different & vague answers from them.

To make you clear, in this post I'll write simple to understand definition of Philosophy Behind Link Building & to help you make sense of what's backlinks truly harmful for your website.

So, What is a Backlink?

A backlink is a clickable piece of text or an image that links one website, webpage, or files to another. As an example here is a link to the Local SEO Consultant at this website, which is surrounded by the anchor text "Local SEO Consultant", So, we’ve got the answer of most important question out of the way.

Backlinks are also knows as Internal Links, Inbound Links & Outbound Links. Let’s move on to Why are backlinks So Important to the web in general as well as for SEO prospective.

Why are Backlinks So Important?

Without backlinks the world wide web (aka WWW) as we know it wouldn’t exist. Without backlinks, how would we ever browse the internet? Now I know you’re going to Say, well I could search in Google to find the results I want. That however is not really going to work because how could Google find and index all the webpages on the Internet without being able to search around from link to link?. And even google managed (Many of you believe, "Google can do anything!") to do it & how could you visit those webpages, if backlinks don't exist on google search index?

So, Backlinks are useful & also important, because it's the reference of the WWW. Without reference we’d still survive, but getting around would be pretty difficult, wouldn’t it?

For example, if a Local SEO Expert has a website about how to build healthy backlinks, and received a backlink from another website about backlinks building, then that would be more relevant in a search engine's assessment than say a link from a site about carpet cleaning. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

How do Search Engines Evaluate Backlinks?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! & Bing crawl the world wide web looking for new content to display to their searchers. They go from link to link, site to site and page to page finding content so they can show them when someone searches a query which each page is highly relevant for. These links could be on websites or blogs or document or social media sites. This is one of many reasons why backlinks is so important to SEO.

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of the particular website. Backlinks are important for SEO, because some search engines, especially Google, give more value to websites that have a good number of healthy quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a user search query.

In Google's eye, A backlink considered to be a positive 'vote' for the receiving webpage from another granting webpage.

Why are Backlinks So Important in SEO?

In deciding how search engines rank webpages, they want to give their user the most relevant & useful result which satisfies the users search query. If you type ‘local seo services’ into Google and you get results for carpet cleaning and janitorial service companies, what are you going to do? You’re going to search in another search engine such as Bing or Yahoo!, and Google may have lost you as a user.

Google is the market leader in search and they have a 63.8% market share in the U.S according to comScore Releases February 2016 U.S. Desktop Search Engine Rankings. They’ve achieved this by giving us the best results when we search for things compared to their competitors. Therefore the key is giving the most relevant set of results for any of the billions of possible things somebody could type into the search box.

Not only are backlinks the reference that search engines use to find webpages but backlinks are one of the major signals that search engines use to decide how relevant and authoritative a particular page is. The links which point at individual pages from other web pages around the internet really help search engines to understand more about pages and how to best arrange them to keep their users happy. You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of information that can be collected from a backlinks and they gather the maximum information possible!

When the search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a user search query (aka keyword), they consider the number of quality inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links & it's quantity, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters most. A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the quality of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

For example, If you are an Carpet Cleaner in Phoenix, Arizona and somebody searches for ‘carpet cleaner phoenix’ you want to be on page 1, right? Page 1 normally only has 10 results and you can bet that there are far more than 10 cleaners competing for that page 1 spot. Whilst there are a huge number of factors in Google’s algorithm and backlinks certainly aren’t the be all and end all, backlinks are one of the strongest factors currently used. In your case, Local SEO is highly important for your local businesses, and of course we do offer local SEO services.

Another reason you may want to achieve backlinks is to allure more visitors to come to your website. You can't build a website, and then expect that people will find your website without showing user the way. You will probably have to get the word out there about your site. One way business owner & webmaster got the word out used to be through backlinking. Let's talk about, how can we help you to build backlinks.

How Can We Help You to Build Backlinks?

Backlinks Building is what we usually do. As discussed, backlinks are not the only important search engine ranking factor to be considered but in any good SEO campaign you will have to build high quality backlinks to your website to help to show search engines that your site is relevant for the keywords agreed upon at the keyword research stage of the SEO Strategy. Building backlinks is known as off site optimization.

Honestly, it’s not easy to get natural authority backlinks (Great Healthy Backlinks Require a Great Amount of Time, Work & Content), after all why would another webmasters or websites owner link back to your site. Our job with the SEO link building campaign is to help you to create mirthful link worthy content for your website and then to use various plans and methods to inspire relevant webmasters or websites owner to link back to your website & content.

The days are long gone, when low-quality reciprocal links, links from link-farms, & paid links worked for search engine organic ranking. Instead we focus our all attention to creating high quality content. We create a serious content marketing strategy & execute them accordingly. We’ll be able to establish your business website as an authority site within your given niche or industry.

What's About Reciprocal Links, Link farms, and Paid Links?

There is much discussion about reciprocal links, link farms, paid links & It's Importance last few years. In the Google Jagger Update at October 2005, In this algorithm changes, Google released a series of updates, mostly targeted at low-quality links, including reciprocal links, link farms, and paid links. Reciprocal links were one of the targets of Google's Jagger update & Google not valuing reciprocal link exchange since then.

Many webmasters had agreed upon reciprocal link exchanges & paid links, in order to boost their website's rankings with the sheer number of inbound links. In a link exchange, one webmaster or website owner places a link on his website that points to another webmasters or owners website, and vice versa. Many of these links were simply not relevant, and were just discounted by google jagger algorithm update. So while the irrelevant backlink was ignored, the outbound links still got counted, diluting the relevancy score of many websites. This caused a great many websites to drop off the Google Organic Ranking.

In a Paid Links, one webmaster or website owner places a link on his website that points to another webmasters or owners website for money. This links too act as reciprocal link & but called one way reciprocal link.

We must be carefully dealt with these kinds of link. Google not only check the popularity of the sites being linked to, but also how trustworthy a site is that you link to from your own website. This will mean that you could get into trouble with the search engine just for linking to a bad website. Please read more about google's Link schemes.

How to get rid of the harmful links Pointing to your website?

• Ask webmasters to remove the links.
• Submit the harmful links to Google disavow tool.
• Make sure to regularly re-check your links.
• Contact Us & We"ll Help you remove harmful links.

What's Link Earning?

Link Earning is the process of creating high quality content that other webmaster, website owner and bloggers cannot fail to link to your website content. And hey, this give you more power if you’re a recognized brand that can build your link portfolio this way. This is indubitably the ideal scenario for any website owner. But if you’re NOT recognized as a brand, however, this version of link earning Technics is highly unrealistic expectation for you.

Because Search Engine Algorithms are highly dependent on quality & authoritative backlinks, you’re not going to rank if you don’t have high enough quality backlinks.

And guess what? If you don’t rank high on search engine organic result, the primary reference that would allow people to find your website useful and amazing, is besieged for all intents and purposes.

So you can’t be found in search engine's organic search unless you have enough backlinks, and you can’t realistically “earn” links unless people are finding your site.

What If I Use Backlink Building Tool?

I wouldn't recommend you to use a backlink building software, it has to be "manual". If you use a link building software to build Automated links, Google will eventually find out and your website could be penalized.

Here are some Automated Link Building Techniques that are definitely going to caught by Google Algorithm:

• Spun Content Submission.
• Blog & Forum Commenting.
• Forum Profile & Comment Link.
• Low Quality Directory Submission.
• Private Blog Networks.

Be Careful Of Outgoing Links: I’m going to keep this part simple, here are some quick guides for outgoing links:

• Bad Neighbourhoods (spam, warez etc sites)
• Moderate or Remove any obvious spam from user generated content and apply nofollow to any outgoing links.
• Don’t link to low quality sites/content.
• If you are selling links, Add the nofollow attribute to the links.
• Add the nofollow attribute to any affiliate links.
• Don’t hide outbound links.
• Periodically review and clean up broken outbound links.

Need High Quality Authority Link Building? Contact to one of our Link Building Specialists today to know more on how backlinks can help improve your website organic ranking.

How Do I Make a Begin Then?

Sylvester Stallone & Caitriona Balfe in Escape Plan Movie (2013)

Have a good read of the pages and posts of this site. We try to straightforward SEO as much as we can at here, and there is some good guidance that we write regularly. We also emphasize the importance of Good SEO Campaign & Mobile Marketing and if you are looking for Local SEO Services & Citation Building Service, we can help. Once you’ve decided what services you need from us, just fill out our contact form and we’ll get right back to you. We’d love to talk to you about your business and how we can help to take it forward online, and quite simply, make you more money.

Don’t worry, Our Local SEO Services & Citation Building Pricing is not expensive and we can talk through the options for you. We offer Guaranteed Local SEO and if you want instant traffic through PPC we can help you with Adwords Campaign Management too. We’re confident that you will have a huge return on your investment from our service. Contact Us Today!

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SEO Tips for Affiliate Website

Nowadays, search engine's organic ranking is much harder, especially for an affiliate marketing website. So how do you get higher organic ranking? The SEO Strategy can be different from site to site, but some of the standards remain the same regardless of the topic or niche.

Here’s How To Do SEO For An Affiliate Website That Gets Higher Search Ranking:

Branded Domain Names
Choosing a strategic domain name that represent your affiliate business is not just a task for those starting up their own businesses. For many, the decision to launch your own affiliate website comes many years after you’ve already built a profitable affiliate business. Use a keyword rich domain name, but avoid looking spammy.

Shopify Have a list of 10 free tools can help you choose a great domain name.

Keyword Strategy
Keyword Strategies are essential to develop a search engine optimized website. The best keyword strategies rely on highly relevant keywords & placement on important parts thought your affiliate website, which are keywords that relate closely to your affiliate business or are associated with the industry you are promoting.

Follow these my standard on-site optimization guidelines:

Make sure the title title tag of each page uses 1-2 keywords, is less than 65 characters in length, and doesn’t contain stop words like “and, of, is,” etc.

The meta description tag should be between 150 and 160 characters snippet used to summarize a web page's content. You should include at least 2-4 relevant keywords in the meta description.

The meta description tag won't help you rank, but it will often appear as the text snippet below your website search listing. Search engines sometimes use these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it.

Use HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6), short paragraphs, and lists (UL or OL) to make your written content easy for readers to scan, and be sure to use keywords in these elements (just don’t stuff keywords where they don’t really belong).

In content links are the most powerful links on a page – footer and sidebar links have fairly low value. Therefore, some of your most powerful on-site links are from in-text links in your website’s articles or blogs.

Use keywords in every page’s file name or URL, every image file name, etc.

When you add an image to a page, be sure to use an alt tag that contains appropriate keyword(s) relevant to the surrounding content.

Link images to pages – the “anchor text” of an image link is the text you place in the alt tag.

Don’t place important content in IFRAMEs, Javascript tags, or as text inside an image.

Don’t use javascript or CSS tricks to try and “hide” text from the user for the purposes of fooling the search engines – this is a great way to get your site penalized by Google or Bing.

When you name files, avoid using underscores, capital letters, or spaces – these characters can lead to broken links and/or crawling issues. Instead, use a dash to separate keywords in file names (just-like-this.html).

Truly Unique Content
By Truly Unique Content, I means content should be original and not duplicated from anywhere else. Unique content plays a crucial role in search rankings organic ranking because search algorithms rate unique content highly and penalize websites for posting duplicate content.

Invest in quality, unique content & add new content to your site on a regular basis. Focus your SEO efforts on creating great content, and then promote that content one link at a time.

Backlinks
The Importance of Backlinks. If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important.

When a website links to any other site, it's called a backlink. In the past, backlinks were the major metric for the ranking of a webpage. A page with a lot of backlinks tended to rank higher on all major search engines, including Google.

Due to link spamming, search engine like google don't pay much attention to all links. All Links are Not Equal & and some are worth a lot more than others.

Get a link from the manufacturer: Get a link from the manufacturer who’s products you promoting. Often it’s very easy & just sending them an email and asking them for a link that will do the trick. You may have to convince them you are legit, so if you have a ho-hum website with crappy content, they won’t buy it and will probably think you are a spammer.

Business Directory Listing
When you list your business in high traffic business directory sites, you are putting your company in front of people searching for services and products just your like yours.

Search Engine Submission
Search engine submission should be one of the first steps to take for SEO. I don't have this as number one because this list is not a top ranking guide. The purpose of SEO is to rank on search engines, so your first initiative will be to get your website indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are other search engines you can submit to, checkout this list out.

Video Submission
You can use videos for brand interaction and engagement. After running a couple of text videos, I found out - you can get more interactions and engage with videos than you would with an image or text.

Article Submission
You have written a very informative article, how will you share it? The best way is through article submission sites. Content submission techniques work best because you are bringing instant value to the table.

Web 2.0 submission sites
These sites can have you post content with a do-follow link back to your website. As the internet grows, you start to take control of what you can post and how you want it viewed online.

Guest Posting
When you are an expert, you can find platforms that accept guest posts. When you guest post, you can include a backlink to your website from your content.

Classified Posting
Remember when you ad to post in a classified ad magazine? Well now, you can find classified sites that where you can post your advertisement online and build traffic.

Blog Posting & Submission
Unless you have thousands of dollars to spend on bring relevant or targeted traffic to your site, you will need a blog that is connected to your website. With your blog, you can post news, updates and other informative content that can nurture your visitors.

Press Release Submission
When you submit a press release, your release is hosted on different high authoritative sites that help with more visibility online. This is not necessarily a link building technique, but it's very important as to how you get your website news to the media.

Nich Blog Commenting
Make sure to read the blog post and keep your comments simple. You don't want to talk about anything else than the post. As for your backlink, make sure to include your name, domain and email in the signature section of the comment form.

Blog comment links is NOT a sustainable or effective way to get links. In fact, they can actually hurt your site in the following instances:

The blog where you posted the comment link is not related to your site.
The blog has been blasted with other spam comments.
If the site where you posted the comment link is penalized.
You use your keyword as the anchor text instead of your name.
If all the links pointing to your site are only from blog comments

Social Profile Creation
When you create a social media account, make sure to include you url in your account details and also fill-out the description box appropriately. Most quality social sites are indexed frequently, so it's good to be a part of them as to grow your brand and increase exposure.

Social Bookmarking Submission
You want your site indexed by search engines faster? Then look for quality social bookmarking sites. With these sites, you can save pages of your website that can be shared on the web.

Photo Sharing
How time has changed, with technology comes different visual ways of interaction. Photo sharing sites are one of the most authoritative sites on the web today. This will include your website in search engine images and rank your website for related keywords. For best results make sure all inbound links are do-follow.

Infographic Submission
Thinking about it - 10 years ago, no one really knew how effective infographics where at the time. today you need them for presentations and visual interactive content. Infographs can help you build quality authoritative links from expert sources online. See a list of sites.

Memes Submission
Photo to snippet videos is becoming a trend. Most post on social media are memes today, so use them to your advantage. Create your own memes, include them in your content and link back to your post on meme sites.

Niche Directory Submission
Submitting your site to niche directories can help you build a brand recognition. When people get to see your site on different directories they frequently visit, the end result will be them trying out your service or product. The are hundreds of niche directories online, just focus on the ones that are directly related to your site and content.

Question & Answers Sites
With the landscape for learning increasing, you can find question and answer site that can allow you to flex your knowledge and skills to help others looking for answers. With question and answer sites you can be sure to include links to valuable content within your site or on your site blog.

Review & Rating Sites
Review and rating sites are becoming more popular due to the fact that today, most people prefer to buy products with recommendations from others who have used it before. Get involved on review submission sites to create high quality do-follow links and increase web targeted traffic to your website.

Micro-blogging Submission
When you create a lot of short content pieces, how do you get your articles or message out there? Micro-blogging sites can help get you there. These sites allow you to publish your own content and curate it. Within your content and profile account, you can post your url and build referral traffic to your website.

PDF Submission Sites
Create white label content like; e-books, guides and checklist manuals to share on these sites. PDF submission sites can be a tremendous way for building quality inbound links because they are easy to link to and share on other channels. See a list of PDF submission sites.

Backlins By Interviews
Backlins By Interviews is an awesome way to build links(or at least get tweets or shares) for your affiliate site. Just find an influencer in your niche and interview them. People can never get enough publicity, so a little bit of flattery goes a long, long way!

You can find influencer on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook

Broken Link Building
Broken Link Building is a link building tactic, broken link building is an effective, white-hat, scalable, content-focused link building strategy that builds links through finding broken links, recreating that broken content, and helping webmasters replace broken links with your corrected link.

Using Check My Links, a handy and free Chrome extension(find it in the Toolkit), you can get see which links are broken. Next step? Email the webmaster informing them of the broken links, and casually ask for a link back to your site.

If the website doesn’t have a contact page or social profiles, you can search the domain name on Whois and if the domain info is public, you can find the site owner’s email address. Send them an email, and see what happens. Success rates will vary from niche to niche, but expect one or two replies for every fifty to one hundred messages you send(Yes, it’s that much work!)

Competitive Link Building
Competitive link building is the art of identifying and acquiring links to your competitors' websites. Going after these types of links is a great way to rank higher on search engine.

Think about it, you search on google & find "abcdotcom" top of google search. Then you find out all incoming links to "abcdotcom" & acquired links to your site from each of the website links to "abcdotcom".

Guess What?

your affiliate website is on the top of "abcdotcom".

Link Prospecting
Link Prospecting is the another art of identifying and acquiring links to your websites. But it often time-consuming and challenging parts of link building. In order to build and maintain a natural link profile for your affiliate website, your prospecting activity needs to cover a wide range of opportunities and generate the right targets and leads for your project/campaign. So prospecting is usually pretty easy to start off with - run a few Google searches and you've got yourself a set of content-rich websites within your target industry.

Ran A Contests or Giveaways
There’s absolutely tons of freebie websites out there or websites that share sweepstakes or contests. This one is a no-brainer, yet so many people don’t do it. It’s a great method to get links AND e-mail addresses.

Maybe not the best option if you sell expensive things like 24 karat gold cufflinks, but if you sell something within a $100-$150 price range, a contest is something worth looking into. With a contest, you approach a blog(or blogs), and ask them to sponsor the contest for you. Usually they will require you to buy ad space or send them a product sample. They review the product and host the contest on their blog, and the way people can enter is that they have to like/follow you for an entry. If your host blog is big, the contest will be picked up by other smaller blogs that will link to that blog and maybe your site as well. For one or two samples of your product, you end up getting a few hundred likes/followers and a nice link or two.

Beware of Paid links, automated link building tools, cheap link building services, and other link building schemes.

Site speed matters.

Strategy, Process & Life Cycle - Grassroots SEO!

Below you'll find the basic layout of your 6-12 month campaign, starting with what's in your SEO strategy. Let's start with milestones. You can put your milestones into a Google Spreadsheet in bold, font 24. Paste items in between milestones respectively, as you grow in your understanding of SEO best practices and techniques.

You can also use project management tools, such as TeamWorkLive.com or Basecamp, both of which allow you to calendar your milestones and create assignable task lists beneath them.

Milestone 1 - Your SEO Strategic Plan (1 Month)

You are going to get to hundreds of ideas and tools thrown at you for keyword research, spying on competitors, finding link opportunities and elements to consider when planning your SEO campaign. Problem is, most presenters don't actually say "okay, add these line items to your research to-do list, phase 1 of 5 in your holistic SEO strategy", they just say "here's some stuff you can do".

What's in Your SEO Plan?

Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase can take up to a month, but will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can squeeze in new research and data-mining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?

1. Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) - This report will help you discover potential crawl and indexing issues. It has little to do with content, and is mostly focused on how search engine-friendly a website is. Criteria might include: checking for broken links and duplicate content, analyzing HTML and XML sitemaps, optimizing robots.txt and .htaccess files, to help crawlers get to the content you want indexed and away from the content you don't. The OAR might also include a review of Webmaster Tools, an audit from your seomoz.org campaign, and possibly data from similar online tools. Basically, your on-page "stuff" goes here.
2. Competitor Analysis Report (CAR) - This is your baseline report, your Day 1, your "aha" moment, where you get to discover some exciting things about your competition, and some occasionally depressing things about your current SEO performance. Having access to Hitwise is the most ideal starting point (if you can afford it). If not, tools such as Compete.com, SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, and OpenSiteExplorer.org can give you really nice insight into where your competitors are earning links, what keywords they are getting traffic from (AdWords and natural search), and even tell you how much more money they spent on specific keywords last month versus the month prior (a keyword performance indicator). For local businesses, WhiteSpark's Local Citation Finder does a darn good job of finding competitor business citations and sorting them by seomoz.org's own Domain Authority for easy prioritizing.
3. Link Analysis Report (LAR) - This report is fun. Using tools like those in the seomoz.org arsenal, or possibly giving Ontolo a spin, you'll be seeking out and creating an organized inventory of link opportunities. Categorize your opportunities by classifications such as: Web Directory, Business Directory, Industry Blog, Regional Blog, Industry Portal, Industry Forum, Industry Experts, Niche Social Networks, and so forth. From here you have a few choices of how to store the information. I prefer Buzzstream, an Eric Ward-approved link tracking software, but Google Docs will do the job as well. If you do use a Google spreadsheet, break your classifications into their own tabs or link building becomes unmanageable.
4. Keyword Discovery Report (KDR) - You'll already have a boatload of data from the first three reports to help with this, possibly the most important, report. You can also explore a number of other tools to help tally up all the keyword opportunities. WordTracker and Google AdWords will provide some excellent ideas, but nothing will beat what you'll find in your own web analytics and Webmaster Tools (provided you are actually tracking conversions and/or sales). With competitor data, you can run pivot tables in Excel to learn about the frequency of keywords the major competitors appear to be receiving traffic from. Purge out the terms that are too broad or not searched enough to be bothered with, sort by relevancy and search volume and you've got yourself a list of keywords to optimize for.

Now that you have all this terrific data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.

1. Put your OAR items into a To-Do List within your project management system (under the milestone of On-Page SEO)
2. Put your CAR items into a Google spreadsheet so you can track and monitor changes over time
3. Put your LAR classifications into one or more To-Do List within your project management system (under the Off-Page SEO milestone), put the opportunities into a spreadsheet or Buzzstream
4. Put your KDR into a Google Docs spreadsheet, create a new tab called Content Tracking Spreadsheet with a column for just the top 100 or so keywords, and create columns to track Page Name, Title, Meta Description, Has Video?, Image Name, Image Attributes, Has 450+ words of Content? Matt Cutts Didn't Throw Up, Is Engaging? etc. In your PM system, your content writing tasks can be assigned (put the list under the On-Page SEO milestone)

Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link bait, widget, tools/giveaways, and other creative link building strategies to add under your respective milestones.

Milestone 2 - On-Page SEO (2 Months)

There are thousands of smart (and sometimes silly) things you can do to optimize your website. You already have a To-Do List assigned in your project management system to square away OAR findings, and a To-Do List for your content team based on the keyword themes you want to optimize for. This initial phase of your SEO shouldn't take more than 60-90 days and typically isn't rocket science.

You're going to get all sorts of new ideas from the seomoz.org blog, Search Engine Land, SEO Roundtable, and thousands of Tweets if you follow #seo in Twitter. Therefore, if you're using a project management system, your template will be growing and growing over time.

Local and Ecommerce websites will have a few special To-Do Lists for data feed optimization, location-based landing pages, and a few other things you might extract from David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors or elsewhere.

Milestone 3 - Off-Page SEO (3 Months for the Basic Tasks, 6 for Moderate)

Mike Essex wrote an excellent post awhile back on 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away. I also like to use my Meetup.com group to have everyone provide 1-3 creative link building ideas to everyone who requests ideas, along with some crowd-sourcing tools, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services. Choose the top ideas based on the business and industry and add them to an Advanced SEO To-Do List in your project management system. You will definitely need to create several project briefs for each idea so it makes sense to the tech and marketing teams.

I keep a Google spreadsheet going that has nearly 400 link building opportunities now (thank you Eric Ward).

You'll also have a list for Basic Link Building (industry destinations and directories), Moderate Link Building (outreach, and slightly more technical than submission-based linking). Advanced link building tasks are really more of an initiative and can be tracked outside of the the project management system as ongoing marketing innovation.

Milestone 4 - Social Media Optimization (1 Month for Setup)

This milestone gets a bit tricky and requires getting in bed with those crazy socialmedia people we all love. Perform an audit of all the current destinations our SMM teams are working with and insure they all contain relevant keywords, profile links, and (if location-based) business name, address, and phone number.

Next, seek out new social media opportunities, such as niche social destinations, popular social networks that have not been claimed yet (Google+ might be a good start). You might even buy lunch for the social team, and then try to give them training on how to blog with keyword-rich links every so often. If their eyes start going crazy as if you fed them after midnight, run away and try again another day. If not, train your social team, in distributing content, video, and micro-blogging to give you a serious lift in ranking. The trick is to make them think it was all their idea.

Milestone 5 - Video & Mobile (2 Months for Setup)

Technically, you can break video and mobile into two different milestones. But for the sake of the novel this post has become, let's bundle them together. For video, I recommend having a quick chat or consult with a pro, such as Mark Robertson of ReelSEO on campaign, channel and distribution ideas. Get ready to setup some video XML sitemaps and to start distributing video to relevant sharing networks. Also be prepared to start using video ads (PPC), which may help long term placement on key YouTube videos.

For mobile, you'll want to slip ONE task in for Milestone 2, insuring your mobile users have a custom experience that's mind-blowing and award winning. The rest will revolve around the creation of mobile apps for your products, mobile search optimization, and possibly even a few short code campaigns. We love Vegas, so I'm always excited to get my MB SMS offers from Mandalay Bay).

I've Completed My Milestones, Now What?

If you get through all the milestones (6-12 months on average - some might overlap, but they don't have to), your project management system should be empty of tasks. If so, you're no longer in Production Mode, you're now in Operations Mode and need only use your link and campaign tracking tools (here's a sample) for your day-to-day SEO initiative. However, you may elect to start over and repeat the entire process annually, depending on the results from the first round.

Now you have 5-6 vehicles of SEO in an organized form. You may decide to create a page for each milestone on your yellow notepad when you attend SEO conferences and events. If a presenter gives you some cool "stuff" to do, you should be able to easily classify the task into one of these buckets, so later you can update your project management template, as though you were putting another piece into a seemingly endless puzzle; which beats the heck out of creating scribble for your crumble ball with beautiful coffee rings on it.

Article First Posted on  - seomoz

Best Online SEO Tools for Links, Keywords and Rank Tracking

Best Online SEO Tools for Links, Keywords and Rank Tracking

We’re always on the lookout for great tools and with a $5 billion industry, SEO is one market that has a ton of tools to help you. Whether you’re researching you or your competitors’ backlinks, trying to identify keywords and cocurrence terms, or simply trying to monitor how your site is ranking, here are the most popular SEO tools and platforms on the market.

Some key features of search engine optimization platforms

• Monitoring Keyword Rankings – the ability to enter keywords and then monitor their ranking over time is a core feature of most of the platforms. Given that search results are mostly personalized, this ability is largely used for overall trending analysis to see whether the efforts you’re making are improving your ranking on keywords or not.
• Local Keyword Rank Monitoring – since the location of the search user and your business can play a huge role, many of the keyword monitoring platforms provide a means to track your ranking by geographic location.
• Keyword Discovery – while many of the monitoring platforms provide you with accurate rankings, they don’t allow you to discover what keywords you might be ranking on that you’re unaware of.
• Backlinks Analysis – if your site is linked to on sites with poor search engine authority, you can have a terrible time ranking. Being able to analyze the volume and quality of the links that are pointing to your domains is imperative for advanced troubleshooting of ranking issues and competitive analysis.
• Keyword Research – understanding keyword related to the products and services you provide is critical to your content marketing efforts. Keyword research tools often offer co-occurrence keywords, question-related keyword combinations, long-tail keyword combinations and the competitiveness of the keyword (so you don’t waste your time trying to rank on terms you don’t stand a chance gaining traction on.
• Scraping & Internal Analysis – Tools that analyze your site hierarchy, page construction, page speed, and other associated issues are fantastic for correcting issues that might be less obvious but that could be causing you a great deal of problems when ranking.
• Social Influence – It’s only natural that the attention you attract across social media is a great indicator of the authority you’ve built with search engines. Newer SEO platforms are providing insight into the correlation between search and social and it’s paying off!
• Data Mining – Strangely missing from many of these platforms is the ability to tag, categorize, aggregate, data mine and develop reports across very large sets of keywords. For that reason, DK New Media built it’s own SEO platform for large publishers. Let us know if you’re interested!

Ahrefs Site Explorer – The largest and the freshest index of live links. Index is updated every 15 min.

AuthorityLabs – Track website rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing daily. Our automated SERP tracking saves you time and helps you respond quickly to ranking changes.

Bing Webmaster Tools – improve your site’s performance in search. Get access to free reports, tools and resources.

BrightEdge SEO is the first SEO platform to deliver proven ROI – enabling marketers to increase revenue from organic search in a measurable and predictable way.

Cognitive SEO Unique SEO features that will boost your link analysis and link building results.

Colibri gives you insight into how to get more traffic and customers from SEO.

Conductor Searchlight is the most widely used SEO platform – empowering enterprise marketers to take control of their search performance.

Cuutio Inbound Marketing Platform – Know your exact positions and competitive situation on Google, keep track of the results of
search engine optimization and analyze the overall performance of your important keywords

Ginzametrics makes enterprise SEO simple and is the only platform to help marketers effectively monetize traffic from organic search.

Google Webmaster Tools – provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.

gShift’s SEO software system centralizes your clients’ SEO data (rank, backlinks, social signals, competitive intelligence, Google Analytics and keyword research) and provides automated, scheduled, white-labeled SEO reports leaving more time for your services team to implement the SEO tasks that will improve your clients’ web presence.

Majestic SEO – Link intelligence tools for SEO and Internet PR and Marketing. Site Explorer shows inbound link and site summary data.

Meta Forensics – Meta Forensics is a website architecture, internal link analysis and SEO tool that helps identify unseen website problems that may be affecting your visitors, search engine crawlers and ultimately, hampering your site.

Monitor Backlinks – Keep all of your link data under one roof with our management tools.

mySEOTool – SEO Software Used by Thousands of Web Designers, SEO Consultants & Agencies to manage their SEO clients.

Ontolo – Our Link Building Toolset has become one of the most-often recommended internet marketing and link building tools by the top SEO and link building experts for it’s automation and link prospecting abilities.

Posirank – Our wholesale platform not only centralizes every imaginable SEO service into a single dashboard – it also supports total automation.

Positionly is powerful, user-friendly tools that make improving your website an enjoyable experience. Monitor daily changes, measure SEO performance, and improve search engine rankings with simplicity.

Pro Rank Tracker – Get the most up to date, easy to analyse ranking information on all your websites, so you can stay one step ahead of the competition and maximize your profits.

RankAbove’s Drive SEO Platform and business intelligence software enables you to dig deeper into SEO information already at your fingertips.

Rankinity – Check your website positions and analyze your competitors in popular search engines in real-time.

RankSonic – Track daily changes in your rankings, get advanced site analytics, spy on your competitors and improve your search engine rankings.

RankRanger – daily reports and insight into your website traffic and marketing achievements.

RankScanner – Monitor your keywords’ positions on Google with a free account.

RankWatch – Rank analysis, backlink watch, keyword suggestions, white labeling, reporting and website analyzer.

Raven has 30+ tools to help you get results in all of these online marketing tasks.

Rio SEO is the best SEO platform to deliver global search success across Organic, Local Search, Mobile and Social Media for Top Brands & Agencies.

SE Ranking – a universal search engine monitoring system offering both hosted and self-hosted solutions.

SE-Intel is the world’s first SEO platform specifically designed with internet marketers in Asia in mind, complete with a full set of features that meet the needs of the vastly different search environment in Asia.

Searchmetrics – Our search and social analytics software Searchmetrics Suite with data-based analysis and intelligent solutions enables marketers and SEOs to monitor and optimize national or international SEO actions and thus increase market share, revenue and profits.

The Search Monitor – Unlimited reporting on all competitors and affiliates listed within universal search results on your keywords.

SEMrush is created by SEO/SEM professionals for SEO/SEM professionals. We have the knowledge, expertise, and data to help you take your projects to the next level. We collect massive amounts of SERP data for more than 95 million keywords and 45 million domains.

SEO Rank Monitor – Boost your rankings, Track your competitors, and monitor SEO performance with the most comprehensive rank tracking in the industry.

SEO Scheduler – Affordable small business SEO software for budget conscious website owners.

seoClarity is the first and only Enterprise SEO Platform that provides you complete visibility into ALL of your SEO efforts

SERPS.com – Improve your SEO results. See how your SEO is working with this beautiful dashboard. No code to install. Fast 5-minute setup. Keyword rankings updated daily.

SERP Scan – tracks your website’s search engine position for the keywords that matter to you.

SERPWoo – Monitor ALL Top 20+ Results For Your Keywords and get alerts when competitors increase their backlinks, social signals, rankings, and more.

sg.SerpStat Keyword Suggestion Tool — popular keywords and their various forms used by people who are looking for interesting products, services or information.

Simple Rank – Discover where your keywords are positioned on Google and Bing. We make it easy to check your Search Engine Rank Position in a glance and see whats improving and what needs work.

SpyFu exposes the search marketing secret formula of your most successful competitors. Search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google: every keyword they’ve bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 6 years.

SyCara’s SEO Platform provides users with industry-leading workflow management, local search rankings, social media reporting, and SEO analysis.

UpCity – Let UpCity help your small business get free traffic from search engines, social media and local directories.

WebMeUp SEO tools combine the convenience of online SEO software with the data-richness only desktop apps could provide.

WooRank is a dynamic grade on a 100-point scale that represents your internet marketing effectiveness at a given time. (The average score is 50.) The WooRank is based on a website review of 70 factors ranging from keywords to usability and social monitoring. Far more than a number, the WooRank review provides you with valuable insights and tips to help you take the online world by storm.

Wordtracker offers Keyword Research tools for SEO and PPC, Rank Tracking and Site Analysis tools.

Note: We don't have affiliate accounts with any of these platforms.