3 Link Building Weapons
I’m going to be blunt. For your site to be successful, you need traffic (the kind that is real and interested in what your site has to offer). And if you want your site to get more traffic – both from search engines and directly, you need links to your site from other sites.
Even with stellar content to offer, obtaining links is a grind at best, and a massive battle for many. This post won’t cover everything you need to know about the fine art of link building, but it will present 3 tools that will make the chore much less difficult. So what 3 tools do I recommend for your link building arsenal? *
Solo SEO Link Search Tool
Free
The Solo SEO link search tool is nothing fancy and it won’t help you win any really tough link building battles. It simply gives shortcut links to various searches that help you find related pages that offer the ability to submit a URL to their site. This will help you cover the low hanging fruit of links – mostly by finding directories that allow submissions. These types of links are low value, but they are easy to obtain. It makes sense to start here, pick the low hanging fruit first, and then move on to the juicier links that are harder to find. Here’s how this tool works. First you enter a keyword phrase into the form shown below.
If you want to build links to your tube socks page, for example, you could enter “tube socks” (without the quotes). The result is a list of links. Each link is a special search performed at a search engine that will list relevant directories and sites that accept link submission requests or provide some means of leaving a link back to your site on their site. You just need to click on each link to run each search. It’s a fairly manual process, and rather boring, but it’s still a lot easier than typing out each of these searches by hand.
Speaking of directories, some are free and some are paid. There are only a handful of directories I would pay to be listed in, and the one I consistently submit to is Best of the Web. BOTW is well known as a quality directory, and they frequently have sales that lowers the price. They are having one right now, in fact. For the month of September (2009), if you enter the promo code SINCE94, you’ll receive 20% off on all new directory submissions and sponsored ad spots. September is almost over, so get your BOTW discount while you can.
Majestic SEO
Free for your own site analysis; paid for competitive analysis
This tool isn’t for the faint of heart. Majestic SEO pours immense amounts of data into your analytical stash, so be prepared for eye-popping amounts of information. The real gem of this tool is the ability to find out where your competitors are getting their links from, so that you can do the same. Here’s how Majestic describes their tool:
Majestic-SEO is the worlds largest backlinks and anchor text database. Our proprietary robots have crawled over 96 billion webpages and found over 697 billion unique links and their anchor text.
This information is available in detailed reports, where links and anchor text are shown in order of importance, based on their backlinks. Each website’s backlinks can all be downloaded as ‘.CSV’ file.
Note: Anchor text is the link text used when linking to a site. Example: This is the anchor text of this link.
Now, you might think that the free version – which is an analysis of your own site – would be useless, but that’s not true. By analyzing the links pointing to your own site, you can find some ways to improve upon them. For example, if a strong site is linking to your tube socks page, but the anchor text is “click here” or something completely irrelevant, it would be worth your time to contact them and politely ask to have the link text be changed to “tube socks” or something relevant. By improving the links you already have, you can improve your search engine rankings for that phrase, and this can often be easier to manage than getting entirely new links.
The paid version is the most helpful though, in that you can see who has linked to your competitors, and you can hopefully acquire links from them as well. The fee is based upon the domain you want information on, so each one varies. The ones I’ve checked, however, are very reasonably priced, so this link building weapon is definitely worth considering.
LotusJump
Paid Only: $24/month for basic subscription; $99/month $49/month for Pro
LotusJump is the creme de la creme of link building weapons. Why? Because it doesn’t just supply you with a bunch of information. Instead it gives you actionable items – a road map of to-do’s for you to implement. If you want a strategic plan laid out for you that says, Ok, do this, and now do that, then you want LotusJump. This is perfect for everyone – beginners to expert. Here’s how LotusJump describes the tool.
1. LotusJump searches thousands of websites, blogs, Q&A platforms and news sources for your keywords.
2. LotusJump’s powerful algorithm sorts and filters these websites to find ones that will benefit you.
3. LotusJump turns these resources into actionable tasks that are delivered directly to your account. Each task includes detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to complete it, making tasks straightforward and easy to do.
You’ll be shown where to create social media profiles, which Q&A questions are waiting to be answered for your niche, what sites are buzzing about and mentioning your topic, and much more.
The beauty of this tool is that although you could manually come up with all of these tasks on your own – you probably won’t! LotusJump does all of the research for you, and lays out your road map for you to easily follow. That’s a huge amount of work you don’t have to do on your own, and it makes actually doing the tasks a breeze!
Now What?
These tools are the weapons you need to find the sites that might link to yours. Now your job is to acquire those links. That means you need to contact someone who has control over the links placed on each site you have an interest in. In most cases, you’ll be emailing someone. And of course, your next question is:
What do I say in the email? Is there a template I can use?
I’m not going to answer that. I’ll point you to a couple of answers instead. Why? Because those answers are perfect, so I see no reason to try to improve upon them. 
Here they are:
The Perfect Link Request Email Template
See? They both say they are perfect, right there in their titles. I didn’t lie.
Ok, ok, since you insist, I’ll add something to the mix. In your email, you may want to offer them something for their time and trouble. You might offer to give them a free sample of your product for their review. Or maybe you could offer to give them free content for their site. You could even offer to write a testimonial for their product, if they will agree to list the testimonial on their site with a link back to your site. Make your offer interesting and useful, and your chances of obtaining the link will increase.
Link Building Weapons Summary
So there you have it. If you can’t find links using one of the link building weapons I’ve listed, then your battle is probably already lost. Good luck in your quest to obtain links!
P.S. This post is strongly related to SEO, but marketing is marketing. There are many ways to attract attention and traffic, so make use of every option available to you. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with a post I wrote on SEO Scoop that should definitely get you heading in the right direction.
* Disclosure: Affiliate links may be used within this post for products I recommend. They in no way affect my judgement of said products, nor do they affect the price of the product.
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5 Responses to “3 Link Building Weapons”
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[...] 3 Link Building Weapons, http://www.dazzlindonna.com [...]
An ebusiness coach, web developer, Internet Marketer, SEO, and all around web geek who makes her living from home doing all of the above.
Great post on link building. I use to just link to my site, but have found that not only is it important to build links, but to also capture your visitors information(such as email address) to build a relationship. Now all my links first send my visitor to a page designed to obtain their name and email address.
On a side note, I like the layout of your site. Is this a custom WP template?
Thanks, Brandon. Building relationships is good too, yes.
This theme is a customized version of Small Potato’s Patriotic theme (free, GPL). You can download it at http://www.wpdesigner.com/2007.....ess-theme/
I found your blog via a Google alert for “link building”. I’m pretty hung up on free tools so the SoloSEO one was new to me. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks,
Raza
Hey Donna,
Though there is no second opinion on the valuable insights you have offered through the post, but I found your casual & conversational style of writing post as an engaging & impressive content.