5 Tools to Turbo-Charge your Link Building
5 Tools to Turbo-Charge your Link Building
- We find that link building is repetitive and time-consuming. Can you recommend any bookmarklets or tools that would expedite steps like prospecting, link research, and email contact follow-ups? Anything you can provide us to help better scale our efforts is appreciated.
Answer: This is an excellent question and you are absolutely right: link building can become repetitive and time-consuming, especially if you are doing it right. Finding that one quality, topically relevant, dofollow link that will move a site competitively isn't easy. That's why the proverbial saying "needle in a haystack" is so applicable to link building as a whole.
The good news is that yes, there are several tools that the professional link builder can add to their toolbox which will alleviate (to some degree) the daily heavy lifting that comes with link building. Here are some of our personal best-in-category recommendations you may want to check out in 2012:
- 1. Best-in-Class Link Auditing Tool: Screaming
Frog SEO Spider - One of the most overlooked ways to get links
is to actually audit your own site or those of your competitors. Finding
external links that are coming into your site on 404 error pages OR crawling
a competitor's site to see where they are linking OUT is a great and underutilized
way to conduct link research. Screaming Frog, which is a desktop installed
program, does this quickly and efficiently and will return detailed link
and on-site SEO information for up to 500 site URLs at a time. You can
also easily export the data in .csv format so you can slice and dice the
data anyway you feel necessary.
- 2. Best-in-Class External Link Tool (Paid):