By Raul Han
When Aditya’s developers finally delivered his finished website, BeBeautiful, it was simply eye-popping. His website, an online beauty, fashion & lifestyle magazine for women, came with every little piece of functionality that communicated what he wanted to say. The only problem, however, was finding his site via a simple Google search, which proved more difficult than he’d anticipated.
For developers and brand manager like Aditya, getting found on the internet has always been tricky. Google, the biggest search engine on the internet, uses well over 200 methods and techniques for ranking websites according to specific keywords. These are constantly changing, which makes it even harder for developers to help brands stay visible without committing insane amounts of resources on digital marketing campaigns.
The quality of a web page and the number and quality of links pointing to the page are among the things Google looks at when ranking said page within its expansive network. Building links is an important component of Google’s various search algorithms and also enables you to improve customer experience on your website.
However, even with all the bags of goodies you can expect with link-building, misusing links within your site will quickly get you into problems with Google – accidentally or not.
Link-building tools are a useful bunch of applications that can help track how your links are performing while highlighting any potential blunders that might see your site penalized.
Check out this collection of some of the tools you can use to manage links within your site.
1. BuzzStream Link Building
BuzzStream is a powerful tool used by individuals and businesses to prospect, manage, and build links. BuzzStream gives you the tools you need to manage your contact list, send customized messages, and build relationships, which is a big part of link-building. With your contacts on one simple platform, BuzzStream makes it easy to manage multiple link-building projects and improve placement rates for all your link-building efforts.
Plus, if you work with a team, BuzzStream distributes tasks among team members and allows you to set outreach reminders for each campaign.
2. Moz Open Site Explorer
Once you’ve built and worked links into your content on your site, it is vital to find out everything you can about how your links are performing so that you don’t find yourself in Google’s bad books. The Moz Open Site Explorer is an excellent tool for following up on links. You can use the tool to pinpoint links that are potentially damaging and cut them off for better rankings.
You can also use this tool to research backlinks and discover new link-building opportunities.
3. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is an awesome tool you can use to build and analyze links. You can use this tool to check up on your competitor’s link-building strategy and possibly build a better one using the information from the tool. It’s also quite easy to use – you just type in the site you want to analyze or the keyword or keyword phrase into a small search box and you are ready to start analyzing.
You can get pretty much every important detail from the site you want to analyze, including external backlinks, anchor texts, referring domains and IPs, and a historical breakdown of backlinks on the site.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a long-time favorite among web developers, digital marketers, and website owners with little to no technical experience. It spots over half a dozen different tools for link-building, including Positions Explorer, Position Tracker, Ahrefs Alerts, and Site Explorer. You can use Site Explorer to extract complete backlink profiles for your site or a competitor’s, yielding information such as anchor texts in use, the strengths of the backlinks, and all websites linking to the page in question.
Ahrefs Alerts is a cool tool within the main application that gives you a heads up every time your company or a related keyword is mentioned or when you get a new backlink, which is pretty awesome.
5. CognitiveSEO
CognitiveSEO is another useful tool for smartly analyzing different aspects of your digital marketing campaigns, including backlink analysis. In addition o backlink analysis, CognitiveSEO also enables you to keep track of your rankings and ensure your content is on point.
Additionally, if you suspect your site was penalized after the Google Penguin update for unnatural links, you can use CognitiveSEO to identify and fix the unnatural links.
Further, you can use CognitiveSEO to check out (snoop really) SEO strategies employed by your competition, which can give you an upper hand.
Bottom Line
When used in conjunction with other SEO tools, link-building is one of the most effective ways of placing your website or blog on the digital map. So, whatever your website is selling, you will benefit greatly from working quality links into your site and tracking them with these tools.
Raul Han has over 7 years of experience as an Internet professional.
SEO stock photo by patpitchaya/Shutterstock
