Archive for June, 2010

What are the best link building tools?

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) falls into two basic categories.

1. Onsite SEO – These are changes that need to be made to a website, either  to the code, the text or the images.

2. Link Building – This is the generation of inbound links to a website

Both tasks involve a lot of thought. Both tasks require access to great tools. But when it comes to link building, it’s the tools that can often be the difference that makes the difference.

Here’s a problem: there are more ‘link building tools’ out there than you can shake a stick at.  In order to find the best ones to use, you need to work out what you want them to do. There are the range of tasks they can carry out.

Link tools can tell you:

*how many inbound links you have;

*the pages on your website they link to;

*where those links come from;

*the type of links they are;

*any anchor text used in those links

*the ’strength’ of those links – how much ‘juice’ they are passing to you

Link tools can help you research:

*pages that include your brand name but don’t link to you – low hanging fruit when it comes to link building

*Powerful pages that you should target for link acquisition

*Pages that include the right context for link acquisition

*links used by your competitors that you may wish to target

Link tools can help you:

*record your link building activity

*monitor your links and check their strength and continued existence

*report the effects of link building program to stake holders

So as a company that does great link building, what tools do we use? Here are a few of my favourites:

Basics

http://wholinkstome.com/

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysite

http://www.analyzebacklinks.com/

Advanced

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/">Advanced

http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape

http://www.majesticseo.com/

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

My Choice

Without a doubt, my favourite link building tool is http://raven-seo-tools.com/. This does the lot. It analysis, reports, researches, monitors, and can also pull in data from your Google Analytics too.

What do you think?

Have I missed any great link building tools? Leave us a comment below.

Tags: Link Building, link building tool, search engine optimisation, SEO
Posted in Link Building, SEO | 1 Comment »

Google introduces Something Similar

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Last week we updated you about Google’s most recent modification to the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Their ‘brand suggestions’ has potentially played into the hands of big brand owners, and increased their share of 2nd and 3rd searches.

Power to the Smaller Player

To give some power back to the smaller competitor, Google have now introduced a ‘similar’ link, at the bottom of the search results.

This is a block of similar sites published at the bottom of the results pages. These link to new websites that Google thinks are similar to the ones that you usually click on. If you click on the ‘pages similar to’ link near the top of the block, you get a full list of similar pages.

Discovering Variety

Google say that this will make it easier for users “to discover the variety of choices available on the web”.

This is what it looks like:

In contrast to ‘brand suggestions’ release, this may help people navigate to less well known websites and brands that are considered similar by Google.

Some Winners… and some losers

If you have a small brand that competes against some large players, you may find that you are getting traffic from this ‘pages similar to’ box.

The flip side of course is that Google is going to be suggesting alternatives to all the big brands. When your own website appears in the SERPs, the last thing you want is for Google to suggest a list of alternatives or competitors.

What about you?

Have you experienced the upside or downside to either of these developments? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in SEO, Search Engines | No Comments »