Link building is all the rage among competitive websites. Anyone who is interested in SEO or online marketing should know how link building works. Basically, link building is all about getting high-quality, relevant websites to link to the one you’re trying to promote. By doing so, you not only increase traffic from visitors to your website of interest, but you also give search engines an indication as to the relevance of your website. The more links you have, the more notable and important your website becomes and the higher you rate in search rankings.
As far as link-building tools go, there are two main sorts: those that help with the data and analysis side of things, and those that focus more on speeding up the process of building relationships with other site owners.
When starting out with link-building, knowing which tools to pick from the wide variety available can be tricky. Some are more popular than others, and often for good reason. So here are five excellent link-building tools to help you get started with promoting your website.
BuzzStream
One of the hardest and most time-consuming parts of linking is getting in touch with other website owners for permission to link to their websites. This is where BuzzStream becomes invaluable. It allows you to create a database of potential link-building sites, and lets you assign them to one worker, and then offers options for getting in touch with site owners. It may sound simple, but when your potential contacts run into hundreds of site owners, things can get very messy very fast, which is why a tool like this is a great asset.
BuzzStream is a massive time saver, and it excellent when working in teams. Although it’s not free, it is quite cheap. The overall tool is not very intuitively designed, however, and the poor management system does little to help the problem.
Still, although it may take time to get the hang of, BuzzStream makes the overall link-building procedure much simpler.
Ontolo
Ideal for locating prospective link-building websites, Ontolo is a powerful but fairly complex tool that is irreplaceable for those who can use it. For link prospecting it is pretty much unmatched, but search phrases have to be very specific. A search phrase essentially tells Ontolo what kind of sites to search for, so if you enter something too vague, you may end up with hundreds of search results.
Ontolo’s main pros are that it is extremely powerful as a tool and offers lots of customization. It also allows end-to-end workflow management. However, it’s not free (starting at $97 per month), it has a pretty steep learning curve, and if you’re not specific with your search phrase it can result in a an overflow of data.
Nonetheless, Ontolo is great value for money and has no real substitute in the market currently.
Citation Labs
Used as a link builder, Citation Labs makes the time-consuming job of finding top-quality sites that are relevant, appropriate, active, and likely to link to you, much simpler than any of the other tools currently available out there.
The fact that it is extremely easy to get the hang of this tool really works in its favor. That, coupled with it being inexpensive and returning quality sites, makes it a hard tool to beat. Though the prospecting phrases can take a while to master, and it has a very short trial, at $27 a month and $2 a report, Citation Labs is a good solution for many.
Raven
Covering everything from on-page analysis to social media monitoring and link building, Raven’s suite of SEO tools is a powerful and versatile library to have. Although a little difficult to get a hang of, it’s worth mastering for its wide variety of options and features, including excellent link monitoring and management, and good integration with Basecamp and TextBroker.
However, the navigation takes a while to get used to and it has no internal outreach functionality. That, along with the fact that it breaks the bank at $99 a month, means Raven is a coin toss for many.
OpenSiteExplorer
Keeping up with your competition is important, and OpenSiteExplorer helps you stay abreast of what’s happening around you. This tool offers a competitor analysis option that gives you a quick and easy way to understand what your competitors are doing to increase their rankings. This is achieved by giving you a list of metrics such as inbound links to a page or site, their anchor text, and Domain Authority (which is a score out of 100 as to the relative power of a domain).
Christina FusanoChristina fusano is a tech blogger working with LeadMD.com, a team of personable, skilled marketers with a massive bent towards technology and results. They provide Salesforce consulting and effective solutions for demand generation.
