SEO Link Management Tools

Link Building Strategies and Tools


From John Almberg's article “If You Want Visitors, Build Bridges!” you learned how links are important to your website. 

Start your linking campaign by determining how many sites are linked to a specific  landing page.  On the search engine of your choice, either Google, MSN and Yahoo! type into the search box:
link:http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html
use your own site name in place of yourdomain and the page name in place of yourpage.

From the list provided by the search engine you will be able to see the 10 sites that this particular search engine considers most relevant for that landing page.  Open the first URL and ask yourself :

  • is this link useful to attract customers to my site
  • is this link relevant to my product/community
  • does this link include my target keyword phrases or words
  • does this link work


The more yeses you answer the better the quality of that link.

Free Link Building Tools

Linkhounds: Link Hounds is a link building resource. There are others link resource sites that are useful too, but the goal behind this site was to give away link tools, link building information, and linking ideas all from one spot.

Rusty Brick:  This tool enables you to easy gather enough data to analyze a page's link popularity. The Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool only looks at Google links and the pages associated with those links. The reports show PageRank data, internal and external link counts, anchor text weights, class C IP reporting and much more.

We Build Pages: This tool investigates the links pointing to a website (backlinks), and groups them according to the C-Class IP addresses they come from. For example, if one backlink comes from 53.25.14.5 and another comes from 53.25.14.6, they would be grouped together. Backlinks coming from the same C-Class IP are most likely hosted by the same company, which may lower the site's search engine ranking.

Back Link Analyzer: A free link popularity / link analysis tool. It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site.

Submit your site to directories

The best way to have your site indexed by the search engines is to have that search engine follow a link to your site from another site.  There are few good directories worth getting links in.

The Open Directory Project: The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The Yahoo! Directory: With Yahoo! Directory Submit, your request to be listed in the Directory will be reviewed and the Yahoo! editorial team will respond to you within 7 business days, for a review fee of only $299. If your listing is accepted into the Directory, there will be a $299 recurring annual fee in subsequent years to maintain the listing.

Niche Directories:  Business.com

Check the links

Link checkers are softwares that analyze websites for broken or problem links.  They are not free but offer a free trial.
Link Checker Pro and Web Link Validator

Strategies

Additional suggestions:

  • e-mail the owner or webmaster of a complimentary site and ask for a link trade
  • issue online press releases
  • submit articles to related sites
  • visit a link exchange directory, beware of  "link farms"