Before getting to the tips and tools, we’d like to quickly outline *our* model for effective link campaign design. This way, it will be easier to understand where link qualification fits and why it is such a critical step of any link building campaign.

For reference, it might be best to review these prior articles on Search Engine Land:

• Linkable Asset Identification: A Starting Point For New Link Building Campaigns
• How To Research, Create And Distribute Highly-Linkable Content
• Different approaches to link prospecting: Link Prospecting Queries, Competitor Backlink Analysis. Topics include: Helping Fix Broken Links, Links to Attack Sites on Prospects’ Sites (I’ve read great stuff from Melanie Nathan and Darren Shaw on these methods but have no personal experience with them.)
• Link Request Outreach: 5 Steps To Maximize The Value Of Every Opportunity

Now that we’ve framed up the specific model we’ll be using for this how-to, let’s dig in!

1. Align link prospecting methods with linkable assets
   Make sure that your linkable assets line up with your link prospecting methods. This means that if you don’t have writing bandwidth in your organization, then any “guest post” opportunities are automatically disqualified. Aligning assets and prospecting methods is a form of pre-qualifying your link prospects and shortening the time it will take to decide whether or not to add them to your “outreach” list.




2. Check the tool-based URL quality scores
   If you’re dealing with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of prospects, it can often make sense to simply remove huge chunks of the least valuable link prospects. Some link prospect sources such as Linkscape, MajesticSEO and our new application provide a scoring method that estimates the value or trust that given pages have earned. These kinds of quality scores make it simple to disqualify massive numbers of prospects that are (most likely) junk. Save them though – today’s trash could be tomorrow’s treasure when you create and launch new linkable assets!




3. Count URL, hostname occurrences in SERPs and competitor backlinks
   The number of times a URL and/or hostname appears can be a vital signal of quality. If you’re using queries for your link prospecting, we highly recommend running them through the URL and Hostname Counter Tool and the process outlined in Analyzing SERP Dominators For Link Opportunities. If you use link building queries in place of your targeted SEO keywords, you will more-quickly discover larger numbers of qualified prospects. In order to make the best use of your time, focus on a single linkable asset at a time with your queries.Also, if you add backlinks to multiple competitors into the URL and Hostname Counter mentioned in the article above, you can check for co-occurring backlinks. Co-occurring links to your competitors from a single URL or hostname is a qualifying signal.




4. Remove duplicate hostname occurrences from big lists
   If you’ve run your query-generated link prospects through the Url and Hostname counter, you can cherry pick the most-frequently occurring URLs. If you’ve queried deeply enough, it’s likely that there will be tens if not hundreds of duplicate hostnames. You probably don’t need to visit each and every prospect URL from a single site to determine whether or not it’s worth reaching out to them. The “Remove URLs with Duplicate Hosts” tool will remove duplicate hostnames from a list of URLs (while keeping the URL of the first hostname instance) so that you get lists of link prospects from separate websites for qualification. The benefit here is that you’re reviewing the top URLs from each website, rather than encountering the possibility of reviewing 20 URLs from the same site. This tool essentially eliminates duplicate qualification work on a website-by-website basis.




5. Make quicker visits to each URL for final decision making
   Once you’ve removed as much chaff as possible from your prospect lists, there comes a time when you have to qualify, by hand, URL by URL. This can take forever. To speed things up as much as possible, we recommend first and foremost disabling images in your browser. Second, we recommend using the “URL Reviewer”, which opens a list of URLs in new tabs in your favorite browser. With the images off, you can quickly open multiple pages all at once, and run through them more efficiently by hand as you won’t be distracted by images (seriously – a long bout of qualification can increase ADD). You also won’t have to wait for images to load before reviewing the site; we’ve found that this is one of the most significant barriers to fast qualification times.
   
   

   Be careful though: try adding only 10 urls at a time at first, then going to 20 so you don’t put too much strain on your computer, then try 30 and so on. Sometimes RAM will be a bottleneck, sometimes it’ll be your router, sometimes it’ll be your internet connection. Find the balance for your setup. We also recommend using Chrome as your browser for this, as it manages RAM allocation much more efficiently than FireFox, Opera or Safari. Ben Wills hand-qualifies up to 250 URLs an hour this way.

   Here’s another tip: use Ctrl-W or Command-W to close tabs, rather than mouse-clicking to close tabs. If you find a prospect, only mark confirmed prospects in a separate column in your spreadsheet. After you’re done qualifying, sort by that column and mark all of the unmarked URLs as “Not Prospects” so you don’t review them again later.

Finally, you’re ready take your qualified list to the Link Outreach stage.

Link prospect qualification can be one of the most tedious parts of a link building campaign. Apply these tips and tools to your process and you’ll find yourself cruising through your link prospect lists… and moving on more quickly to Link Outreach!

20 applications for backlink analysis beyond link building

Links are an astoundingly rich source of data for all manner of marketing and business decisions. Here are 20 different ways our experts suggested to draw value from backlink analysis, ordered based on the number of mentions each one received.

1. Competitive intelligence: 7 mentions
2. Find new content ideas: 6
3. Appraise a domain for purchase: 3
4. Measure previous SEO efforts: 3
5. “Risk tolerances” of competition: 2
6. SEO-awareness of competition: 2
7. Gauge budgets of competition: 2
8. Online reputation management: 2
9. Find ad publishers (PPC, affiliates, banners): 2
10. Penalty diagnostics: 2
11. Decide whether or not to link to a site
12. Find new site/product feature ideas
13. Gauge social media presence of competitors
14. Relationship building
15. Finding niche communities
16. Keyword research via backlink text analysis of competitors
17. Identify pages on competing site that convert well
18. Degree of competitiveness in the space
19. Gauge how deeply connected a site/company is within a space
20. Press list creation

Key comments on backlink analysis beyond link building

“The one aspect I get out of viewing a competitor’s backlinks is how prevalent their social media presence is. Not only will you know which profiles are passing link juice, you’ll know where to put some effort into your social media campaign. I usually try and tie the two types of marketing together as much as possible, so I always take note of company social profiles.” -Ryan Clark

“By analyzing the client’s backlinks, you can get a very good measure of their previous SEO efforts as well as their overall SEO budget when making that all important sales pitch. If for example, you find the client to be listed on Yahoo! Directory, Best of the Web and other expensive web directories you can assume that they have a fairly decent budget to work with. You also need to do a full backlink analysis when considering taking on any client so that you avoid dealing with any clients who have previously engaged in any blackhat or shady link building.” -Paul Teitelman

“I suppose my approach could be summed as ‘market research’ – I want to gather as much understanding of the market as I can and I don’t think there is a better way to understand a market than through link analysis. Importantly, I won’t do link analysis just on competitors, I’ll do link analysis on news and information sites – it’s very revealing! I also use link analysis to build my press list – this takes time but it’s pure gold.” -Ken McGaffin

“Establishing rules based on a link analysis of certain kinds of sites will allow you to create a rule to prohibit linking to certain kinds of sites. Any kind of venture you engage in where your site becomes a partner, the link analysis should be a part of the decision making process. This includes guest posts, advertiser screening, and helpful resources to link to.” -Roger Montti

“If it’s a commercially oriented website, sometime you can gain some insight into pages that convert well. If someone has a focus of anchor text or links to a specific page, you need to look is it a “money term”? Are you targeting it as well, does it tip you off to other variations?” -Michael Gray

“Competitive Intelligence. I use it to identify everything from advertising opportunities to link spam. If you know what to look for, a good backlink analysis that goes deeply within a narrow vertical is like an X-Ray into any an amazing number of things.” -Eric Ward

Closing thoughts: “What questions did I leave off?”

When given the opportunity to interview experts, it’s always a good idea to ask what questions you may have left off. Here are the questions (and answers) that our experts appended to the group interview.

“Maybe one question could be the implications of the history of the domain and DNS ownership as it relates to backlink analysis. Specifically in regards to dropped and or expiring domains, which I see webmasters trying to pass off all the time. Basically my point is that a backlink profile can be manipulated quite easily, so it’s crucial to always undercover the true story of the link profile by first exposing the history of the domain itself, so looking beyond just Pagerank, number of links, cache dates, etc. to analyze the true power of the website as a whole.” -Paul Teitelman

“Real Time link analysis – it’s incredibly easy and useful to get an idea what the competition are doing right now simply using Google Alerts and Technorati for instance.” -Shaun Anderson

“I don’t know if this is a viable question for anyone else, but if I was asked What is the most valuable take away from a back link analysis? I would have to say: inspiration. Whether I’m doing a client back link analysis or a competitive one, inspiration is what I’m, looking for. I want to have an “Oh my god!” moment where something hits me, an idea, or a realization that can lead to innovation.” -Jennifer Van Iderstyne

“I’d certainly include some statements that we really can’t definitively valuate links given we don’t know many parameters such as actual PR weighting and things like temporal anomalies, phrase based IR and page segmentation. There are simply way too many element we’re unsure of the usage, weighting and implementation. That’s not even inclusive of dampening factors (spam signals etc…). I believe that there is an inherent ‘art’ to link profile analysis. There are no tools that can account for elements stated above…” -David Harry

“Link building is an ongoing process, it’s not something you can do once or twice and forget it. You may be able to put it on the back burner, but it’s never something that you can ignore.” -Michael Gray

“‘Are you single?’ Yes, but don’t get your hopes up :P hehe.” -Gab Goldenberg

14 URL factors in backlink profile analysis

The URLs of linking pages can tell you a great deal about a given site’s backlink profile. The URLs themselves can shed some light too when evaluating the quality of a given link prospect. Some of the link builders interviewed didn’t place value in URL analysis when investigating backlink profiles. Some did. Often, this comes down to differences in style and process.

1. TLD (if .govs or .edus have been linking it can indicate high-trust, high-value content)
2. Target keywords in the URL
3. Target keywords in the hostname
4. Number of URL parameters
5. Depth of the page on the site (as measured by /’s)
6. Iterations of ? and other extraneous characters
7. Excessive hyphens in a URL can indicate over-SEO’d content
8. URLS on blogspot or wordpress
9. Avoid https:// and ftp://
10. “links4free,” “getfreelinks,” etc…
11. The words “review” or “advertorial” (can indicate paid posts)
12. The linked-to site mentioned by name in the URL (can indicate a paid review)
13. Words that indicate content types (ie: “blog,” “news,” “forum,” etc…)
14. Excessive amounts of links.html and links.php indicates a weak profile

Key comments on URL factors

“Anything that indicates a news and information site is high on my list.” -Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

“I’ll look for footprints that can help me find more link sources similar to that one.” -Gab Goldenberg, SEO ROI

“It is not something I spend time on. It is nice if their URL has keywords in it, but the link is valuable with or without that being the case. Other factors matter much, much more.” -Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

“When reviewing URLs, one strict but useful criteria is to scrutinize any website that uses hyphens in conjunction with keyword phrases in their domain name. A little SEO knowledge can sometimes be like a sharp stick in the hands of a child. Hyphenated domain names can be an indicator that a webmaster is running around with a sharp stick.” -Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

“I’m looking for the presence of target keywords in file paths and names and at TLDs. I’m also looking to see if there’s an opportunity to purchase a similar domain name (in the case of exact match), with an alternate TLD.” -Ken Lyons, of Wordstream

“Even an ugly URL can get indexed, but you want to make sure that it’s the canonical URL for that page and that your link didn’t wind up on some duplicate page. It’s also preferable when the URL structure is clean and uses descriptive phrases.” -Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

“To me, if a page is quality (i.e. relevant, has PR, dofollow, ranks well etc), then I don’t really care what the URL is.” -Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

“It’s more of what I DON’T look at. A URL itself can be an amazing source of signals, but more often, I look at URLs as a means to steer away from the junk.” -Eric Ward, EricWard.com

“If you see a lot of gardening-resources-7 or links.html near the top of their backlinks you know their profile is pretty weak.” -Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

“I look for things like keywords in the URL (more is good), URL parameters (fewer is good), and the depth of the directory (fewer slashes is good).” -Jeremy Bencken, of WebSimple

29 on-page factors in backlink profile analysis

When investigating backlink profiles, it’s vital to look at the pages that contain (or will contain) the link. Link builders consistently cited on-page analysis as a crucial element of backlink profile analysis.

1. Link embedded within relevant content that discusses link target
2. Title, headers, and content to see if the theme of the page is on topic
3. Text surrounding the link
4. Does the link appear paid or given freely, by editorial choice?
5. Does the page rank for its title?
6. Spam content in comments
7. The anchor text of the link
8. Page linked from other external websites
9. Proximity of the page to the root location
10. How well the page is linked to from within the website
11. The URL being Linked To (home page or deep)
12. Location of the link (on the page)
13. Number of outbound links on the page
14. Page Content (topic and amount)
15. Page back links
16. Page cache date
17. Pagerank
18. Quality of outbound links
19. Logical, appealing page layout
20. Page is bot-readable
21. Title and HX tags present?
22. Content buried under CSS and javascript?
23. Important page on the site vs. a “throw-away” blog post
24. Can you add directly to the discussion
25. Excessive advertising
26. Intent
27. Excessive links from link directories or blogrolls
28. Excessive links from links.php pages
29. Duplicate links on the same page (what is the first link’s anchor text?)

Key thoughts regarding on-page factors

“On page criteria is integral to the backlink analysis process. Outbound links are critical. It’s important to do a double backlink analysis. Analyze the backlinks of the sites your link candidate is linking to. This will help determine exactly what kind of link clique you are going to be associated with. Building a link clique independent from established link cliques is a way of combatting the established 800 pound gorillas that are entrenched in the top three. When you study the backlink of established sites you will generally see a relevancy pattern. Poaching from their backlinks only makes you a part of their sphere of influence. In my way of doing things, I aim to establish my own, and it has worked in overtaking websites that are a part of multi-million dollar networks for important two word keyword phrases. On page criteria is a key part of this process.

The ideal web page, in terms of on page factors, is a web page that has zero SEO fingerprints. Zero.”

-Roger Montti

“In general, I prefer to see a fairly decent pagerank (1-3 depending on how far down the page is in the site architecture) with a good amount of both external and internal links (can’t stress this point enough). Obviously relevancy is a must, but a more telling signs of a pages’ authority is its cache date; within one week is great, 1-2 weeks is average, 2-3 weeks is just OK, and anything 3+ weeks isn’t very powerful.” -Paul Teitelman, of Search Engine People

“The page must be closely geared towards my client’s target term or I don’t even bother. I want prospects where I don’t have to convince them to link; they just do it because it’s a logical fit. ” -Melanie Nathan

“A neat tool for quickly analyzing the value of getting a link once you’re on a page is Foxy Rank” -Tom Demers, of WordStream

“Is the link in the middle of content on the middle of the page, if not, take that into account. What other links are around it? Where do all the external links point out to on the page as a whole, are they relevant destinations to your site? Was this link added to the page after the fact or did it show up when the page was created?” -Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

28 on-site or sitewide factors in backlink profile analysis

When analyzing a potential link prospect (or a key competitor) there are a number of sitewide inbound link factors to analyze.

1. Site type distribution of inbound linking sites (Blog, Directory, Social Media, Press Release, Website, ETC)
2. Domain age
3. Toolbar PageRank (both domain and linking page)
4. MozRank
5. Recency of the latest post or other newest content
6. Estimated traffic
7. Presence of social network widgets
8. Unique linking IPs
9. Unique IP blocks
10. Does the site rank for its domain name?
11. Does the site rank for its target terms?
12. Which pages of the site are getting the most links (helps to determine what has worked as link bait)
13. Unique link distribution (Unique IP Adresses, Unique IP Blocks)
14. PageRank distribution across site
15. Link Type Distribution (No-follow, Do-follow, Missing, Broken)
16. Reciprocal links
17. Number of indexed pages (gauges how SEO friendly their site architecture is)
18. Link accumulation speed
19. RSS subscribers
20. Human comments
21. Does the site have a logical structure and hierarchy?
22. Is it easy for a human and bot to navigate?
23. Hosting Location Distribution
24. The sites’ relevance to and focus on subject matter
25. Site using KWD rich internal anchor text
26. The total link count.
27. Does the site come up for country-specific searches in Google
28. Anchor text distribution

Key insights regarding on-site factors

“I look for evidence of human activity. I’ll want to see who writes the content and how dedicated to the task they are. I’ll also look at evidence of audience participation – do people leaves comments on articles for example. Once I’ve established in my head that it’s a quality site, I’ll look for opportunities such as ‘write for us’, ‘submit an article’, ‘editorial guidelines’, etc. I’ll also look for partnership opportunities with sites I’m really taken with.” -Ken McGaffin

“We look at the website’s linking profile and overall strength of backlinks. Specifically, we look at deep links within a website we’re trying to acquire a link from for our client. If the homepage is very strong and the site has no deep links, then the value is typically lessened. The structure of the website and how strongly focused it is to the client’s business is the next best indicator for us. Is it easily spidered and indexed by Google. A quick way to see this would be to type in “site:widgetsite.com,” then look at not only the pages indexed, but also pay attention to the diversity of the title tags, descriptions, and URLs being indexed in Google. Stronger websites nearly always have a wider and more clear diversity while previewing the indexed pages from the website.” -Brian Gilley, of Social SEO

“A lot of the link stuff is recursive. So when you look at an individual page or site that someone is getting a link from sometimes you can also see where that site is getting links from and come up with new link building ideas based on that.” -Aaron Wall

Further reading:

• 30 Link Builders Discuss Backlink Analysis For Campaign Design – Part 1
• Paul Teitelman’s extended answers to the backlink profile analysis questions

Here is a complete list of our contributing link building experts. Thank you to all the contributors for their time and gracious contribution of hard-earned experience.

You’ll find each expert’s answer grouped by question. You’ll have to assemble the “big picture” takeaways yourself by reading through all the responses. I’ve read through this at least three times now, and each time I come away with new ideas. There is repetition, but there’s enough difference that I believe even the most experienced link builder will have a moment or two of discovery-induced excitement.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the contributors. I can’t wait to put what you’ve taught me to work! And we’ll see you again in part 2, which looks at the technical aspects of what exactly gets analyzed, and in part 3, we’ll gather up all the loose ends.

Here are the 3 questions covering backlink analysis in campaign design:

1. When and why do you perform backlink analysis?
2. How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?
3. What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

When and why do you perform backlink analysis?

To warm up my experts, and provide a framework for the overall discussion, I asked about when and why they perform backlink analysis. By and large, backlink analysis is a first and foremost step in designing a link building campaign.

Julie Joyce, of Link Fish Media

I perform backlink analysis when I begin a new link building campaign and periodically throughout it, especially when something’s not quite right and I need to investigate to see what’s going on behind the scenes. In our agency, backlink analysis is almost always done by myself and other senior staff who have years of SEO experience, so we’ll typically formulate a plan with the clients, then pass on our plan to the link building team. The reason that we do this is to get a good outline of the site’s link profile. Are there link spikes over the past few months or years? If so, why? Analysis helps us to identify issues that we think could potentially become problematic, and to figure out why they occurred and what to do for the future. Without checking the past, it’s hard to know how to move forward properly.

Eric Ward, Search Engine Land link columnist

I do backlink analysis for any number of reasons, but there are two primary motivations. First, I do them for specific client work. Second, and far more often than the first reason, I do them as part of my own efforts to understand the types of things that affect link seeking success, rank, publicity, and tendencies across a wide variety of verticals.

Debra Mastaler, of Alliance Link

When doing custom, competitor outreach and content generation programs.

Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster

The why is simple: the value of a website is as good as its backlinks. Content is great, but in terms of link building content takes a secondorary role for determining the value. The backlinks, ideally, are a reflection of the quality of the content.

Webmasters rely too much on the Google toolbar and on third party link analysis tools for metrics. Fact is, nothing is better than eyeballing the backlinks oneself in order to determine the value of a site. There are many poor practices that are commonly accepted as being useful. Eyeballing the backlinks, taking a moment to see why sites are linking to it and how they are linking to it will help determine whether a site is going to help your link building efforts.

Some of these bad practices arise from misinterpreted observations that are subsequently perceived as loopholes to be exploited. For instance, one of these poor practices started from the observation that nofollowed links showed up in the Google’s backlink reports, including Webmaster Tools. That’s the observation. The mistake is to be ignorant of the fact that Google only shows a sampling of backlinks and that this sampling has never differentiated backlinks that helped a site rank and backlinks that do not help a site rank. The observation of nofollow links in WMT has led to the erroneous conclusion that nofollowed links have value and has led to a resurgence of blog comment spam. Eyeballing the whys and hows of a backlink will help in the determination of whether the thousands of backlinks a site has are useful or not.

Where most backlink analyses falter however, is focusing on quantity while discarding otherwise quality backlink candidates, particularly those with low PageRank. This is a case of webmasters relying on the toolbar without realizing they are relying on the toolbar. Google is known to rank web pages in the top five regardless of a lack of backlinks. This is what some might call the mom and pop boost, elevating a quality site that lacks inbound links. But you have to think about why? Is it the content? That certainly has a role. It’s clear that simply counting the backlinks of a site and making the one with the most link the winner doesn’t work. The search engines are more sophisticated than that it’s not uncommon to see low pagerank pages ranking at the top. So something is going on here that needs investigation.

The search engines are analyzing link graphs to determine the relevance of a site to a particular query, and part of that analysis is to throw out sets of sites that raise certain flags. This process is generally referred to as earning trust, but I’ve been coming around to seeing it more as part of the process of identifying what niche bucket a site belongs in, with the spam bucket being one of several. Imagine these buckets as clouds of sites that are relevant for particular topics. Now here is the question that webmasters aren’t considering. Is it possible to rank a site according to the relevancy cloud that a site belongs in? If it’s possible to extract meaning from the clouds of “meaning” a site belongs to, then it’s possible that a relevant site with low to zero PR regains importance as part of a link building project. This is something I refer to as determining the link clique.

An important role of backlink analysis is culling out the bad link candidates in order to speed up the process of finding the best ones, to cut down on wasted time. For example, you can make your criteria strict in order to bypass sites that have the possibility of using questionable SEO tactics. One rule, a strict rule, is to remove from consideration any website that has an overwhelming amount of links from no-followed comments. There are other more specific rules I use, but I don’t want to single out specific groups.

Jeremy Bencken, of Web Simple

There are three reasons I perform backlink analysis (on sites other than my own):

1. Website acquisition. Is an acquisitions candidate’s backlinks paid – are they likely to disappear, or likely to be discounted by Google? Are they hard to replicate? For sites with mostly-organic traffic, backlinks are their core competitive advantage.

2. Link prospecting. Do my competitors have links my site should have. Unfortunately, if you rely on this alone, you’re by definition trailing competitors. A better strategy is to ask, “what audiences are organically linking to my competitors and how can I use those ideas to generate my own focused link building campaigns?” What other adjacent markets might also be interested in my site’s story? The key is finding inspiration, ideas, and improving upon inbound linking trends you discover from competitors.

3. Link policing. Are my competitors participating in shady link schemes? I know this is controversial, but I’m of the opinion that link purchases that can be discovered is just poor SEO, and reporting them to Google (in hopes they will be penalized) is a service to the SEO industry.

Michael Gray, Search Engine Land columnist & Wolf-Howl.com

A backlink analysis is one of the key aspects of any site’s SEO profile. You should always address any on site issues first, such as canonical, site architecture, page templates, but backlinks are the first step when you start looking at offsite SEO. It can be your site, a clients site, or a competitors site, backlinks are really critical.

Shaun Anderson

I’ll carry out some simple backlink research at the beginning of any project to identify any obvious link hubs in the vertical, and/or any obvious quality link sources, or to just examine the types of link opportunities available in this sector. Once I get the team of flying monkeys out of keyword research and into deployment (via article submissions and dropping semi-quality links on sources I know change positions) I’ll revise my linkbuilding analysis and further target the next wave of links to try and acquire / emulate. So, in effect, I’m constantly analysising links month on month, but I never just rely on the links others have already got.

Eric Enge,  Stone Temple Consulting

There are two reasons for performing backlink analyses of your competitors and major players in your market space:

1. To identify the most important links that those sites have, so you can request links from them.

2. To learn what their link building strategies they have been using.

It is the latter point that is actually the more important point of the two. Once you understand your competitor’s strategies, and/or where they are obtaining quality links, it becomes much easier to decide on what your strategy will be.

We like to do backlinking of competitors very early in our engagements. Link building, and more broadly “promoting your web site” remains the most important thing you can do in an SEO effort. Yet there are so many different choices for link building campaigns that any given publisher can pursue, yet the return on each campaign can also vary significantly. For that reason it is critical that you put careful thought into deciding your strategy. Seeing what has helped major competitors thrive is invaluable.

Wiep Knol

I always do a quick backlink check before I take on a new client. Just to check what kind of link building they are doing, or have been in the past. If the client has high expectations, but also has a very polluted link profile, I might choose not to take on that client. A combination like that can only turn out the wrong way. When I start a campaign, I dig in a little deeper and take a look at the competition as well. This can give me an overview of the industry and competitors in general, but it could also give me inspiration for what websites to target or what kind of content to create.

Brian Gilley of Social SEO

We primarily use backlink analysis reports to dissect the backlink profiles of our client’s competitors. Running a thorough backlink analysis of between 4 and 7 competitors and then meshing those similar or unique backlink details together gives us a strong roadmap to help our initial link building efforts for the client. We don’t just look at domain and page authority or getting links from the aggregated backlink data we’ve collected. Instead, we use the data to really educate the client on the types of backlinks we should be focusing on within our link building campaign — whether that be industry-specific, local, social media, link bait creation, or another types of link that we can identify that’s paying off well for competitors.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne of Search Slingshot

I always perform a back link analysis at the beginning of an SEO campaign. I feel like it’s important to understanding a website’s history. Sort of like cutting down a tree and examining the rings, you can uncover vital information about a website’s past and use that information to plan for the future. I also like to perform a back link analysis periodically throughout a campaign, just to look for surprises either good or bad, and to gauge the success of any particular link building effort.

Then of course, there are good reasons to perform an analysis when a sudden problem arises, like a loss of rankings. I always check the back links to see if the answer is there. You might discover the site has some how got tied into a bad neighborhood. Maybe the site got lost, driving around downtown Compton in a Lexus at midnight… If that’s the case you wanna know about it, and a back link analysis will tell you if that is the case.

And sometimes, when you’ve hit a wall brainstorming new ideas, a back link analysis can provide inspiration.

Paul Teitelman of Search Engine People

Backlink analysis is absolutely crucial to get a solid insight into what previous efforts have been done for a client or for a potential client. Before starting on any SEO campaign for a client (or even when pitching clients) I do a complete, exhaustive backlink analysis to see both the amount of links, and the different types of links (articles, directories, blogs, social media sites) that have been built already. Even more importantly is to thoroughly analyze the anchor texts used in order to give you a complete insight into their current “link profile”. This helps determine what kind of link building strategy I need to execute both in terms of link velocity and link variation.

Melanie Nathan, Canadian SEO

I do backlink analysis mainly when starting work for a new client so I can get an idea as to their profile (number of links, strongest links, anchor text etc). I also mine the backlinks of competitors while looking for suitable prospects. Even if I find a 404 error on a competitor’s site, I’ll do a quick backlink check on that particular page, to see if the links have value and if there are any opportunities to scoop them.

Brian Chappell, of Adapt Marketing

Backlink analysis occurs typically when reviewing new niches for me lately. Or analyzing a clients site for potential answers into ranking falicies, good or bad. Links to me tell a story, so its very important to understand the age, location and anchor text of a sites links.

Wil Reynolds, of Seer Interactive

Now I do it at the onset of a campaign, sometimes you get beat on anchor text, sometimes its authority, sometimes it is just raw number of links. But you won’t know what you are up against unless you do a competitive backlink analysis up front.

Tom Demers, of Wordstream

When I consult, I do a lot of site audits, and a major piece of these is backlink analysis (for clients and competitors.) I also conduct a similar analysis upon taking on a new project, even if they haven’t ordered a site audit. This is basically a deep dive look at the types, quantity and quality of links in the client profile, and a slightly higher-level analysis of some of their competitors. On an ongoing basis, I’ll periodically audit a client’s backlink profile, and I’ll frequently look at backlink profiles of competitors or interesting sites to mine them for links I can either get or generate a link building idea from.

Ken Lyons, also from Wordstream

There are four distinct reasons I perform backlink analysis.

1. SERP appraisal: when targeting verticals for new clients, I evaluate the link profiles of the big dogs that dominate the page one SERPs. I want to know why they’re top ten. Usually, I can grab a lot of intelligence sifting through their links profile, both domain and page level. I’m looking for weakness and opportunity, something I can exploit or duplicate.

2. Competitor evaluation: when I see anyone else outranking my established sites for target keywords, I want to know why they’re ahead of my site in the SERPs. Typically, that boils down to some link advantage: more links, better links, superior relevance of links.

3. Internal link audits: I feel it’s critical to analyze my own site’s link profile to determine why certain pages perform better than others. Is it based on level of competition in the SERPs, or is it the result of certain links in my own profile that are passing equity and relevance to these top performers. If it’s the latter, I want to try to replicate these quality links to as many of the other “money” pages on my site.

4. Link discovery: most SEOs use keyword tools for keyword discovery. They should also be analyzing link profiles to discover new link opportunities. I’ve stumbled on some prime link partners sifting through a competitor’s backlinks. In fact, when I see spammy, low value sites outranking mine in the SERPs, I get giddy because I know if I rummage through their garbage link profiles, I’ll find gold. It’s evident that there’s some juicy link pushing them ahead of me. I just need to roll up my sleeves and find it.

I have to add that a backlink analysis is only a part of a link building campaign. In some cases, it’s a very small part, in other cases it may be a bit more, but only looking at your competitors or your own history will never get you optimal results.

Gab Goldenberg, Search Engine Land columnist & SEO ROI

I perform backlink analysis when I need to have an idea how challenging and time-intensive it’ll be to rank a prospective client. This also gives me an idea as to whether I should even take them on or whether their needs are beyond what I can provide. I’ll also do backlink analysis if I’m considering a few different affiliate niches and I want to see what’s easiest to rank on, relatively speaking.

Christoph Cemper

Whenever doing competitve analysis, going after competitors links, buying an existing domain, out of curiosity for good rankings

David Harry

Three main reasons are:

1.  Competitive analysis: whenever we’re getting into a new query space we use it to guage how tough the space may be by looking at some of the competitor link data.

2.  Client analysis: obviously when we get a new client, we’d be looking at the profile to get a feel for where they are at the moment.

3. Content programs: obviously when we’re looking at content placement and other strategic alliances we’ll look at link profiles for prospects.

Arnie Kuenn, of Vertical Measures

We perform backlink analysis whenever we are either performing an SEO review or trying to obtain links from pages linking to our clients’ competitors. It’s a very efficient and effective way for finding relevant pages and is a comparatively easy method to discover high quality links. This works especially well if you can discover a path that the competition has taken with respect to attracting links.

Dixon Jones, of Receptional

Whenever a client specifically approaches us for this, but also, we work on this with retained clients after we have sorted out their site architecture. No point in developing links unless and until the client understands that changing url structures has consequences! Typically, we carry out an analysis before starting ANY campaign, as our quickest wins are typically found during this exercise. We even, these days, conduct a very brief analysis free for the client for our own benefit in reply to their initial inquiry.

Ann Smarty

Backlink research has been a great way to do the following:

• See the competitors’ strengths.
• Learn the competitors’ friends and promoters. As well as their tactics to promote themselves.
• Learn the clients’ past link building tactics (to diagnose the penalty for example).

Bill Hartzer, of Vizion Interactive

We have a very specific process for link building. We usually review the links to the site when we first hear of a domain name (like during the initial sales process or when talking to a potential client) so we can get a good idea of what would be involved in promoting that domain name/the site. We then perform an initial, detailed backlink analysis of the target domain, but also of many online keyword competitors so that we fully understand the market and the competition.

Ken McGaffin, of WordTracker

I’ll do informal and formal backlink analysis. Informal will just be a quick look to check out the quality of a site.

I’ll do formal analysis when I start on a new project. I’ll look in-depth at each of the major players. I want to assess what their linking strategies are and how well they’re implementing them. As well as that, I’ll be looking for influential blogs and the people behind them, community sites, news and information sites and particularly journalists who are writing about the topic I’m promoting.

David Lewallen, Cybernaut SEO

I perform a backlink analysis at the beginning of a new engagement with a client in order to get a feel for their backlink profile. This allows me to gauge the sophistication of their link building initiatives to date as well as to determine what is working for them or has worked in the past. I also like to see if the client has been up to risky business (buying links, bad neighborhoods ETC…) and to determine what needs to happen in order to mitigate that risk.

Ryan Clark, LinkBuildr

Backlink analysis is one of the most important aspects of any link building campaign, aside from the links themselves. You should be on top of your backlink analysis before, during and until you forget about the certain campaign. The first place you’ll need to look to is of course the top 10 websites ranking for your keyword. Without an idea of what the competitor has hidden behind the mask of their SEO efforts, you’re going to be building links in the dark…not something I’d recommend you should do. I always make sure to look at the sites ranking for the top 20 results. Eric Ward recently wrote about even checking past 40 -50-60 etc (http://searchengineland.com/linking-food-for-thought-34113). There’s no harm in seeing what you can leverage for your own profile, and you’d most likely save yourself some time in the long run.

Ben Wills

Most often, I perform backlink analysis for two reasons: 1) to identify sites with multiple citations to competitors for link opportunities, and 2) as a method for identifying the competitiveness of a keyword space. The more competitive the backlink profiles, the more competitive that keyword space will be.

Aaron Wall, of SEOBook

Mostly I do it at the beginning of entering new markets…and mainly when trying to decide an entry point to the market. If you try to compete head on with limited resources that makes winning harder, but if you find an area where the competition is weak or you have a strong competitive advantage you give yourself a much better chance to succeed. Most of the backlink analysis I do is just an overview look at the market using SEO for Firefox.

How does backlink analysis inform or affect your link building campaigns?

With this question, I hoped to hear more about how link builders moved from the backlink profiles of clients and competitors to actually designing a campaign.

Roger Montti, aka MartiniBuster:

Link analysis is the backbone of all my link building campaigns. Let’s talk about a double backlink analysis. Eyeballing who links to a site is the first step. The second step is to review who they link to, and then doing a backlink analysis of those sites they are linking to. The other day, I found a PR 6 site that was linking out to what looked like decent websites but a backlink analysis showed that those sites had backlinks from sites that linked out to self-described black hat websites. None of those sites rank well, either. So the double backlink analysis is a good one to use. Most people would take the PR 6 but for me that site is a loser. A strong case for not trusting the toolbar for making link building decisions. Link analysis done by your eyeballs, without the use of a third party tool, is the way to go. It’s fundamental.

Jeremy Bencken:

It’s a huge source of ideas for finding audiences who’d be interested in a site and worth approaching with promotion opportunities. For example, if my client is a pizza restaurant and I realize some Pop Warner football team is linking to their competitor, then you can bet I’m going to look into why they’re linking. Once I figure it out, I’m going to try to improve upon the idea and pitch every kids sports team I can find to link to my client. This is the fun creative part of link building: reverse-engineering why people link, then creating new opportunities that take advantage of the same dynamic.

Michael Gray:

You want to look at who is linking to the competition, are they getting mostly low quality high volume links, or are they getting mentioned and linked to from authority sites. If a site is getting links from well known, and trusted online resources, you modify your strategy accordingly.

Ken McGaffin:

Backlink analysis is crucial to a campaign. But I’m not looking to chase up links to competitors, I’m looking to build up a sense of the important influencing or information sites in the market I’m researching. Once I’ve got that list, I move on to thinking about what type of outstanding content can I create.

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

A back link analysis creates a baseline for any link building campaign, by posing and helping to answer these questions:

• Are there problems which need to be rectified?
• Have there been bad linking choices?
• What existing success can be capitalized on?
• What strategies have been used in the past that could be expanded or replicated in the future?
• Are the back links too one note?
• Is there a need for diversification?

All of these questions need to be answered in order to design the most effective campaign possible and can be answered at least in part, through a back link analysis. Also, existing back links can help create ideas for how to build new ones.

Dixon Jones:

The analysis helps to quantify and demonstrate the scale of the task at hand. In some instances, the website in question is underdeveloped by a massive factor compared to their competitors. This usually reflects relative differences in brand building on and offline in the past – but if a local paper hopes to compete with the BBC, they had better reframe their objectives to think around local terms, for example.

Julie Joyce:

We don’t get into the nitty-gritty of saying “well this backlink profile has 455 mentions of the keyword fashion and only 427 for clothing, so let’s attack clothing!” We use it to formulate a general outline. We want to know what the most commonly used anchor text was so that we can discuss plans with the client. We want to identify opportunities to make things better, so if we see an inbound link that points to a less-than-optimal page, we might want to contact the webmaster and point out a better bit of content. Basically, the analysis that we do gives us the information that we need to lay out our plan for the next few months. Without the analysis, I don’t see how we’d have a good idea of where to move next.

Bill Hartzer:

A thorough backlink analysis tells us where we are now, how many links we need to get, and where the competition is right now. Then, depending on our analysis, we will put a certain amount link building resources towards the project depending on how competitive the market is. We also continue to perform our link building analysis process on a regular basis to make sure that we’re keeping up with the competition.

David Lewallen:

I like to see what types of sites have linked to the client in the past and determine what specific strategies and techniques have worked for them. This gives me a starting point, if a client has not done any link building I start with the basics, but if they have a well versed link building then I will employ more advanced strategies to boost their profile. I also like to see if their business partners are linking to them and in what fashion. I check to see if there are links going to 404 pages, broken or missing pages.

Shaun Anderson:

It helps me see the linking habits in that vertical and the types of links that have secured sites top ranking already, and the types of links I may find available for me. For instance, Im currently looking at a vertical where the number 1 position has links that are all kind of spammy. But they’re working…. so I can assume there’s not a lot of domain authority in play in that vertical, and can assume if I throw a bucket load of low quality links at the site over a short time (months) I can hide the odd real quality link in there that will get me at least into the top few results.

Brian Gilley:

It affects our link campaigns heavily since we look at the overall compilation of link data from multiple sources and then determine our focus after we have fully examined the data. If it looks like a piece of content has gotten the majority of its ranking strength from industry-specific channels, then we know that following the same direction will likely be more costly. If the backlink data has a good percentage of article/contributor based websites, local links, and it heavily focused on driving linkable content from social media sources, then we can gear our campaigns and budgets accordingly.

Paul Teitelman:

Backlink analysis has huge implications on any link building campaign. As I mentioned, by analyzing the current amount of backlinks you can then set your campaign strategy both in terms of link velocity and link variation. For example, if a client had very few backlinks, you know that you need to take your time and only use the absolute safest link building practices with lots of anchor text variation. On the other hand, if the client has a massive amount of backlinks with lots of link and anchor variation already then it’s a completely different story. In this case, you know that you don’t need to be as concerned with the speed at which you build links, but need to concentrate on higher end link building strategies with focused anchor texts as the basics have already been mostly covered.

Brian Chappell:

At surface level, it tells you who’s linking to you, and who possibly you should go to for new prospects. But if you really dig deep you can gain intelligence required by competitive terms that require an understanding of the cost/benefit relationship to actually ranking higher organically. Aaron Wall has always nailed this home and I feel its right on point when thinking about time invested and link analysis.

Tom Demers:

It greatly impacts the quality and quantity of links I’ll target for a client or a project. Determining the competitiveness of a query space is pivotal in attempting to rank a keyword(s) efficiently. See this post on competitive query analysis.

Wiep Knol:

It can provide some basic historic and competitive insights, but it can also be used for identifying new potential link targets.

Gab Goldenberg:

It allows me to identify patterns as to the most valuable links in a particular niche, and perhaps come up with link sources I would never have thought of. For example, I found out that for a hotel I worked with, a local escort review board was a good source of links! By patterns, I should clarify that I mean what sorts of hubs you see in a niche. Escort review forums aren’t a pattern in the hotel space, but you can find things like Hamlet Batista did in promoting RankSense. I’ve done SEO for a mass-market piece of software too, and so I can confirm that PAD files are a source links.

Ryan Clark:

I’m a firm believer of building quality links over quantity, so I’m always looking to see how you’re doing on your end in that department. Let’s say someone ranking in the top 5 for your target keyword has 500 links, 75 of them are of medium to high quality. I can tell from that just what kind of links I’ll need to catch up to them and take over. If you’re specing things out for a client then you’ll also be able to have a sense of the cost for them. It’s really hard to measure a cost with ranking success from a link building campaign. A competitor’s backlink profile might reveal that they’ve paid to be in Business.com and the Yahoo Directory. Little tips like that can start to put a dollar value on your campaign costs which helps keep things in perspective. * keep notes/journal on how many links it took to rank for said keyword

Christoph Cemper:

By looking at what the competition has, or has not you get an idea of the playing field that you’re in. thats especially important if you work in so many different industries and niches as we do for our clients

David Harry:

I’d say many times one of the more important aspects of link profile analysis is finding new opportunities. Many times, unless one specializes in a market, it isn’t obvious which routes to take with link building. I find that the process of reverse engineering during the competitive analysis can help find approaches we may not have had in mind originally. This has a huge affect. Where are they strong? Where are they weak? How balanced is the profile? Much of this affects the actual campaign to be implemented.

Arnie Kuenn:

It gives us a lot of information if we do a deep analysis. We can certainly discover what is working to help other sites get ranked and as I mentioned in #1, sometime we discover a whole method of obtaining links, not just a list of domains and pages to target in our link building efforts. For example, did the competition have an angle to attract .edu links? Did they distribute any free products or tools to attract links?

Ann Smarty:

The best thing about the backlink research is that it inspires me: this way I can see which direction I can go, how creative I can get and which site types will work best.

Debra Mastaler:

Any information found is strategically used in our decision making process. We don’t necessarily use the same link sources in our linking efforts but knowing where and how a competitor links helps us plan a smarter strategy.

Dennis Hettema and Elias Kai:

When I identify an interesting source through backlinks I try to get a picture of the keywords that this source is strong in and target their competitors. ie. If I find a camping site linking to my website for (biking shoes) I figure out the keywords that this camping site is trying to rank on. These keywords I cluster and I identify the top ranking players in the SERPs for that cluster. These are the guys I would initially target for link building.

Ben Wills:

Backlink analysis is used mostly as seed data for identifying potential link prospects. As mentioned above, it might also be used for competitive analysis or multiple citation analysis.

Aaron Wall:

Mainly it determines if we decide to enter the market or not, and what piece of it to enter. Sometimes co-citation tools like Hub Finder and clever search queries can help you find particular competitive strategies which you can try to duplicate or at least learn from.

What elements of a backlink profile are most useful/telling in competitive analysis?

In this question, I hoped to draw out what’s most important to look at in the competition’s backlinks.

Julie Joyce:

This is a great question for discussion, because I think that we could get into the art vs. science thing here. Basically, I feel like a bit of a link analysis hippie. I see the general pattern, get an idea about the overall aspects of the backlinks without needing to tie it down into discrete bits. Therefore, all of it matters to me in terms of importance, but I honestly do not look at my site vs. yours and pick out why one is better. I think a lot of it is very relative, and I realize that I’m sounding too New Age-y here, but there’s a lot more to why someone does better than you than that they have 5000 more backlinks or that their anchor text variance is much nicer than yours. I’d look at everything. I’d look at variety of anchor text, deep linking, authority site links, sitewides, contextual links, types of sites linking, and of course the simple amounts of everything, but I couldn’t pick out any as being that much more critical to me than the others.

Ken McGaffin:

I really want to cherry pick the best targets and then concentrate on those. So I’m not concerned at all with numbers but with quality. I want only the best targets; links from them will be difficult to get, but they’ll be worth the effort many times over.

Roger Monti:

The most telling is how natural the links are and how relevant they are. I will not consider any site that has irrelevant backlinks that are a result of a link bait campaign. Google analyzes the relevance of a backlink. They have been doing this since at least 2003. Part of that analysis is to deprecate the PageRank of irrelevant backlinks. This is a fact. Link bait campaigns are about quantity. But quantity is only a part of the backlink equation. The lack of control over relevance and quality is where link baiting as a link building technique fails and becomes a dead end. This kind of analysis reveals things about a site that the toolbar will not.

Jeremy Bencken:

Time. If you have a link building tool that identifies when links first appeared, then you may be able to identify spikes around particular campaigns or link purchases. Then you can get clues to why the links were created by looking at them.

Shaun Anderson:

The actual sites the links are on. I use to find out if I am up against link farms, blog article syndication, properly marketed content, viral success, small business or big brand…. or indeed SEOs lol

Eric Enge:

We do still look at metrics such as PageRank (or mozRank) and mozTrust. A highly trusted site with high PageRank is not guaranteed to represent a killer link, but there is still a correlation there. I am sure we would all agree that MIT, or USA.gov, or the NY Times are all probably highy trusted by the search engines, and are cetainly perceived as authorities. They also happen to have a PR9 of PR10 Google Toolbar PageRank. That does not mean that there are no clunkers with high Toolbar PageRank – there are. But, the sites you are looking for most likely have high Toolbar PageRank as well.

However, you do want to look at other metrics as well. Gather the founders of the company together and simply ask them who the leaders in the field are. That data will also help you identify sites that are likely to be seen as trusted and authoritative by the search engines. Taking the authority aspect a bit further, sites that have lots of links from other authority and non-authorty sites in the space are more likely to be seen as authoritative, and a backlink profile can help you get a sense of that.

One component that people often overlook, is that it is not just about the authority and trust that a domain has, but it is also about the page which the link can be found on. The classic example is a student page on a major university web site. The student does not speak for the university, and it is not likely that the search engines credit much of the domain’s authority or trust in such a page. So you need to look at that as well.

You also don’t want to overthink theses analyses. If I have identifed 10 sites that based on their PageRank and mozTrust levels that might be authoritative, I could spend two hours per site trying to determine how authoritative they are. However, in 30 minutes I can analyze their site content and organization objectives, have determined who to contact, how to contact them, and written them a highly personalized email.

Wiep Knol:

It’s the overall picture that can tell the most. A backlink profile with a relatively high amount of links from home pages does not have to be bad. But if this website has an over optimized anchor text portfolio as well, and tends to get most of their links from navigational website elements such as footers or sidebars, some things may be wrong.

In general, you can tell if a website has been building links by their anchor text portfolio.

Paul Teitelman:

Great question, after a while all the different factors kind of blend together to tell a story when comparing one site vs the competition, but for those starting out I’d definitely say to first focus on looking at the anchor texts in each backlink profile. You obviously want to see a focus on your targeted keywords but want to ensure that good link variation was properly utilized.

Although the number of backlinks is obviously important, the link variation used is actually a more telling sign of the power of that link profile. Ideally you want to see a variation of link building strategies (articles, directories, blogs, social media, etc. etc.) as well as authoritative mentions (.org, .edu, online newspapers, clubs and business associations). The overall number of links can easily be inflated: whereas getting high authority mentions online cannot, so really can’t stress this point enough.

Brian Gilley:

The age and number of backlinks at the page level of a backlink analysis is the most helpful for us. If we see that a specific page of a link prospect’s website is 4 or more years old and has a solid backlink profile of tens or hundreds of links, then it will provide us with a solid and valuable link. The most informative backlink data we’ve used over the past few years is looking at how deep and diversified the backlink profile is for any given competitor’s website. That means examining the most linked-to pages and determining how we can create content that achieves the same greatness.

Tom Demers:

For me it’s (in no particular order):

• Domain Page Rank
• Links
• Unique Linking Domains
• Difficulty of Link Acquisition
• Distribution of Link Types

These give me a nice baseline for how competitive a term may be to rank for, and can help me to generate ideas around which specific tricks I might replicate, and what my link profile will need to look like in terms of link quality distribution.

Ken Lyons:

These aren’t listed in any specific hierarchy of importance, but some of the critical link signals I look at in competitive analysis are:

• Link quantity
• Link quality
• Page level vs. domain level links
• Unique linking domains
• Domain age
• Top-level TLDs: .edu, .gov
• Quality directory presence: DMOZ, BOTW, Business.com, Yahoo!
• Social media mentions: Diggs, Delicious bookmarks, Twitter citations, etc

David Harry:

Certainly the old standard,  toolbar PR is useless by and large. Consider a page that has plenty of links, but they were obtained after the most recent export? Just because a page has no toolbar PR, doesn’t mean it isn’t garnering actual PageRank.

So we need to look at:

• Total links
• Status (nofollowed?)
• Anchor text
• Linking page TITLE
• Link types (editorial, forum, social etc..)
• Diversity (overview of link types analysis)
• Link age (ie; link decay potential)
• Velocity (rate of link growth)

Jennifer Van Iderstyne:

In a competitive analysis, I’m looking for quality but I’m more interested in discerning strategy. Trying to determine how this site has gone about getting links. That means looking for patterns and commonalities. Is there one particular page that has a lot of back links? What’s on it? Is there a predominance of one kind of link? Do the links appear (or could they be) paid?

I like to ask questions during a competitive analysis. Answering those questions is the most important part of identifying patterns and discerning the competitor’s strategy. Only when you have identified a pattern can you attempt to replicate it.

Bill Hartzer:

I’m more concerned about getting a lot of links from a lot of different domain names. I’d rather have 100 links on 80 different domains than 1100 links on 20 different domain names. A good mix of all types of links is helpful, as well, not just directory links or blog comments or article links or press release links, but a good mix of all of those. Even having some nofollow links may play into it, as well.

Melanie Nathan:

It really depends on the purpose of the analysis, but most often, sheer volume of links, backlink quality and targeted anchor text are what I scrutinize.

Knowing the sheer number of links my clients have vs. what their top competitors have, helps me determine how far I’ll have to climb to get them to (and beyond) that level. And knowing the quality of their links and what they’re heavily targeting helps me determine how fast I’ll be able to get them there.

Brian Chappell:

Age and anchor text as well as the rate of link growth over time.

Michael Gray:

Looking at the domains and URL’s can tell a lot, I’ve looked at so many backlinks now that I know example.com/keyword/page1.htm is almost certainly a link directory. Links from radio stations and local TV stations are also highly suspect since that industry is overflowing with link buying/selling.

Wil Reynolds:

Anchor text distribution for the top 10-20 sites vs. my site for a given keyword, this will let you know if you are in a dogfight for anchor text links.

Authority links that are not buried more than 3 clicks from the homepage – a lot of authority links get archived deep in a site, so its not enough just to look at if they have links from authority sites but to also evaluate how far from the homepage that link is, if that page with my link has any internal links pointing to it, and if I have targeted anchor text. Analyzing this on the top 10-20 will show you your highest value targets.

Christoph Cemper:

Each datapoint is valuable – we look at over 40 different parameters for each link! the most popular that you want to check for each link are obviously Domain Age, Backlinks to the page, Juice/Rankings for the page, if/when it was last changed, when the page was created, etc.

Arnie Kuenn:

I would have to say this starts to become some what subjective. Some of it you can only gain from experience, looking at hundreds of sites over time. You can get pretty good at spotting paid links, paid blog posts, free directory spam, etc. When that doesn’t jump out at you, you start looking deeper for “paths” as we call them here. What content are people linking to? Does this site work for coupon offers? Did they create some really cool research that people linked to? Is their blog attracting lots of links? And so on. If you can discover these “paths” then we try to create something similar on our client’s site to attract similar links.

Ann Smarty:

Of course, the answer may vary from niche to niche but most often these are links from blogosphere. Bloggers will tell a lot. How useful is the tool / service? How do they promote themselves (paid posts are usually either obvious or disclaimed). Do they have anything of value to offer? Were they ever engaged in some link bait / viral campaigns?

Dixon Jones:

We map the relative ACRanks of competing sites’ referring domains, creating normalized graphs that help to show the relative link “qualities”. This shows some interesting redflags in the competitor strategies.

Eric Ward:

Aside from the low hanging fruit of target site identification, what I find most useful is being able to look across a large sea of URLs pointing at any given site/URL, and based on experience, I can tell who is using what tactics, and whether or not they are going to work short and long term. Call it live link forensics. The ability to see who is on the right path, and who is about to blow up.

Ben Wills:

The relevance (keywords in the title, h tags, etc) and value (PageRank, backlinks, authority, etc) of the sites and URLs linking to those pages

Next time in this series…

• URL assessment
• On page & on-site factors

So. Do you interview others or try to get others to interview you?

Either way, the queries are the same to find your prospects. Here are query ideas to get you started.

Media interview queries

[kw] intitle:expert interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] expert interview
[kw] intitle:”group interview”
[kw] intitle:”advice from”
[kw] intitle:”chat with”
[kw] intitle:”conversation with”
[kw] intitle:”discussion with”
[kw] intitle:”q and a with”
[kw] intitle:”tips from”
[kw] intitle:”q/a with”
[kw] intitle:”q&a with”
[kw] intitle:”question and answer with”
[kw] intitle:”questions and answers with”
[kw] intitle:”thoughts on”
[kw] intitle:”talks with”
[kw] intitle:”talk with”
[kw] intitle:”discusses”
[kw] “group interview”
[kw] intitle:”thoughts from”
[kw] intitle:experts interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] intitle:experts interview or talk or discuss or answer
[kw] intitle:expert interview or talk or discuss or answer

To speed up your research, auto-create these interview queries in our new link building query tool. Just add your keyword and select “Thought Leader” from the Asset Type dropdown menu.

Running queries and analyzing your interview prospects

The queries above show you people and sites that conduct interviews (targets for getting interviewed) and they show you people who submit to interviews (targets for interviewing).

If you want to get interviewed, use our guide to qualifying link prospects to identify the sites that will have the greatest impact on your rankings. For large digs I’d also recommend removing the “intitle:” command from the queries above, running each query and then analyze them using the SERPs dominator process. This will show you a far larger universe of prospective interviewers (hat tip to Dennis Hette.ma for this idea).

If you want to interview people in your industry, make note of people who consistently give interviews and gather all the URLs of all their interviews. Interview subjects are highly-likely to help promote your interview with them. Make note too of community metrics that illustrate their social reach such as Twitter follower count, how many times they’ve been listed on Twitter, their blog subscribers, etc.

By no means should your interview prospecting stop with queries though: your existing relationships are another great source for interview prospects.

To interview or be interviewed?

Interviewing others—especially group interviews—has the potential to earn many links but far fewer leads. Getting interviewed earns you one link but many leads. If you’re newer in a space, build your community and reputation by interviewing others. If you’ve been in the space longer this does not give you the “right” to be interviewed, but you will have a better chance of landing interviews through outreach.

Interviewing others, either solo or in a group, requires careful question preparation. If you land an interview with a prominent industry expert you must go back and review their previous interviews (it won’t do to ask questions they’ve already answered elsewhere, unless you use a different angle). In group interviews you must create engaging questions that help your guests demonstrate expertise and meet the information needs of your audience.

Getting interviewed requires far more finesse and relationship building. You’re asking others to “vouch” for you to their readership, plus do the actual work of interviewing you which may require becoming more knowledgeable about what you do. If you don’t do your homework in approaching potential interviewees you’ll come off looking arrogant and overreaching. But, the leads are worth the effort.

Further thoughts on interview execution

Preparation is everything, whether you’re interviewing by phone, email, audio podcast or on video. Treat every interview like a serious business engagement by conducting thorough background research. Know where your subject went to high school, his first job after college and be prepared to ask how these historical nuggets impacted his ascent to the top of the industry (unless those questions have already been asked in other interviews). But you’ll know this because you already sourced and took notes from all previous interviews by querying: ["person's name" interview].

On the other side of the microphone, in some cases you may get more interviews if you write and answer great questions for yourself and simply submit the interview as if it were a guest post. Researching previous interview questions with industry experts—and staying relentlessly, thoroughly helpful—will help you ask yourself some solid questions that make it easier for your interviewer to hit the publish button. Further, be aware that the person interviewing you might be interested in your capacity for pushing the interview in your community. It won’t hurt to let them know how you plan to help promote them!

Group interviews done well are exhaustively thorough. Here are two fantastic examples from the link building space: 11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out and Link Value Factors. Your goal as a group interviewer is to dig out nuggets of actionable brilliance using questions and your decisions about organization and editing. It’s a lot of work, but if you have great interview subjects and incisive questions, the links will follow. Plus, promotion is “baked in,” as the interview subjects will mention the interview to their network.

By creating an inventory of link building assets, you lay the foundation for a sustainable link building campaign, whether you’re a one person business or leading a link building team at an organization with thousands of employees, and hundreds of thousands of website pages. The most effective way to structure a link building campaign is based on the organization’s linkable assets, and the most effective first task for a link builder is to create a linkable assets inventory.

We’ll begin with a working definition of link building assets, follow with a process for creating a linkable asset inventory, and then provide resources and encouragement for turning your assets into links. We first advanced the link building asset idea in 21 Link Builders Share Advanced Link Building Queries.

Link building assets defined

A linkable asset is a person, web page or other resource capable of inciting a person or organization to create a link. We’ve identified two broad types of assets: the “tangible” link building assets on your website, and the “intangible” link building assets of your organization.

Download the Link Building Assets Inventory Worksheet >>

Inventory the link building assets on your website

Start your assessment with the website. Because the site’s pages and functions already exist, these “tangible” assets can result in links with minimal reliance on others within the organization…or even with the sole work of the link builder. These asset types are high-level suggestions to get you started thinking along these lines.

What pages currently attract links? From whom? Why?

Pages on your site that already attract links are the most likely to attract more links, and with the least amount of effort. Understanding why people have linked to these pages can help you when you’re crafting your outreach link request emails. You can, using the Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) data in the SEOBook Toolbar, identify the pages on your site that attract the most links. You can also pay a fee (or register your site and get that data free) to use a tool such as MajesticSEO to download link data about your site, it has a report that orders your pages by the number and quality of links. YSE data seems fresher (and is FREE, while supplies last), but tools like Majestic are much faster. We outline a method for identifying most-linked pages of a site here.

Tab-by-Tab site navigation linkability assessment

Asking the owner or marketing manager what’s linkable on the site is a great place for linkbuilders to start. However, nothing beats a systematic, tab-by-tab nav and subnav exploration. In this assessment, the link building strategist thinks “laterally” and or “creatively” about each core section of the site… the question is: “is there a site out there that would want to republish, reuse or mention this particular content.”

High-quality, well edited and moderated forums and blogs are the more obvious examples. Jobs pages are one example of a site section that’s often overlooked for link building potential, as are upcoming events pages, white papers, webinars, and so forth. Test whether an asset actually has corresponding opportunities with a few quick queries. If anything turns up, put that page or section into the asset column for deeper queries.

Widgets, free apps and other forms of content?

Though these should show up in either your tab-by-tab assessment or the YSE site dig, definitely ask the appropriate folks in your organization if any of these assets exist. We “found” a highly-linkable 300+ page free ebook that was part of an old lead generation campaign during one linkability assessment phase for a client. This little treasure was worthy of its own dedicated prospecting and outreach campaign. Ask people internally, and ask across departments as much as possible to dig up any assets that may escape your attention otherwise.

Brand, organization’s good reputation in industry are unique value proposition

Sometimes, some companies truly are linkable simply for “being themselves.” Bloggers and other analysts writing about a competitor really aren’t having a complete discussion without mentioning industry leaders. People who compile lists of similar organizations but leave this company off have presented an incomplete view of the industry. In these occasions of obvious omission, link builders should strike up a genial email conversation and lead the page owner towards the only obvious course of action – a link!

Data points for your linkable asset inventory:

Here are the spreadsheet columns we recommend for documenting the tangible, linkable assets on your website.

• Asset Type
• Linkable pages/site section URL
• URL of sample link target for this particular asset (note: it’s not an asset unless there are link opportunities!)
• Query used to find this particular topic
• Suggested queries for deeper prospecting
• Total number of distinct queries per asset

Inventory the link building assets within your organization

Assessing an organization’s intangible linkable assets is a bit more tricky, and typically involves a bit more conversation, fact-finding and general back and forth internally than identifying the tangible assets. Knowledge leadership is one example of an intangible linkable asset; however, you have to get this asset to perform an interview, write an article, or get on a podcast at a specific time. When it comes to intangible assets, by and large you’re creating more work for someone. It should be understandable that you have to convince them that their work is worth the effort or even the cost.

At least 5 hours of link building work a week

An hour a day link building investment adds up, and in time can translate into a steady flow of quality links. If you have determined the strategy and processes of your link building campaign, from prospecting for opportunities to qualification to outreach, then 5 hours a week will go to good use. If your hours can extend to writers, developers and/or designers within your organization then all the better. Most web design and marketing roles in an organization can and should be viewed as link building assets.

Innovation creators and thought leaders

If your organization’s thought leaders already write a blog or publish articles consistently in your industry’s media, then your job gets simpler: find them more opportunities for relevant and valuable links through article placement and interviews. Selling the value of this kind of media participation isn’t that hard, but getting someone to buckle down and actually write or even set aside an hour for an interview can be tough if they’re not already in the habit. Make very sure you have buy-in before finding and confirming placement and interview opportunities. Further, make sure you know and capture the data (monthly traffic, target audience, etc.) that will help your thought leaders decide where to put their efforts.

PR department

If your organization has a PR department, or even if they have someone who occasionally handles PR functions, link builders should learn more about their capacity and willingness to help out with link building. Make sure press releases have followed links with appropriate anchor text, and make sure that they place the press release beyond the standard submission sites. Many industry vertical media sites freely publish press releases. If the PR functionaries write or manage thought leadership creation, they may be eager to learn of more quality sites that accept content submissions and publish to a relevant, targeted audience.

Any department that consistently publishes or updates onsite content

Is someone posting new jobs, products, events, software updates, technical usage updates, pod casts, videos or other content as a regular function of their day-to-day work? In many cases, there are sites that aggregate and publish this information and provide followed links. These assets should have shown up in your tab-by-tab assessment above; they’re included here because in some cases you can and should put the burden of acquisition on the departments creating the opportunities – especially if by creating a feed they could “set-and-forget” their link building.

Partner relationships, licensed technologies and vendors

Are your partners linking to you? Do the companies who you buy from have a link to you? Have you created your “Powered By” badges? All of these relationships are potentially linkable assets. Get the partner, licensee and vendor lists and investigate their websites – be sure to proceed with caution and through appropriate channels for outreach though. Many of these relationships are likely to be very personal, and ideally and link request should go through the person most familiar with the organization.

Budget

Is there available budget to pay for directory listings and other sponsorships? If the organization already has directory links, find out which ones… many industries have ten or even tens of high quality directories that could drive relevant traffic, not to mention a rankings increase.

Data points for your linkable asset inventory:

Here are some columns we suggest for documenting the intangible, linkable assets of your organization.

• Asset type
• Name of person or department considered to be a linkable asset
• Sample URL demonstrating asset’s linkability – probably this will be a competitor, or someone who has used this asset for link building
• Demonstrate the existence of link prospects (sample queries, lists of vendors, etc)
• What quality and quantity of links could be expected?
• What support, deliverables, resources will be required for execution?
• How quick or easy to execute (scale of 1-5).

Inventory to action: prospecting, qualification and acquiring links

Remember that throughout your linkable asset inventory (download here) the end goal is action that will result in more links. The point of the inventory though is to outline the scope of your opportunities, and help you to create a campaign that will best support your marketing objectives and resources. Choosing where to start can be tough. Here are some ideas, assuming you don’t need to create linkable content.

Some thoughts on selecting a starting point:

• Build more links to your most-linked and/or most-linkable assets
• Start with opportunities that require the least work (for you or other departments)
• Start building links to assets with the highest number of quick opportunities for links (based on your test queries)
• Start with the departments you’re most connected with – start with internal allies
• Start with the assets and prospects that interns can execute on effectively
• Start with link-oriented outreach that supports a product or service launch

Having chosen a starting point, you still face considerable workload and campaign structuring in order to execute effectively and meet your link building objectives. Here are some tools, resources and guidance for making link building an ongoing, asset-driven practice at your organization.

Keyword-Based Prospecting for Link Opportunities

• Create your list of asset-oriented link building queries.
• Look at the SERPs occurrence frequencies of your target keywords to find opportunities.
• Harvest your competitors’ backlinks with large-scale backlink data collection processes and tools.

Qualify your link opportunities

• Read and implement the Guide To Qualifying Link Prospects For Relevance, Value & Potentiality.
• Also consider some other values for qualifying link prospects.

Outreach to acquire links

• Read and implement the Link Building Outreach Guide.
• Read 9 Tips for Effective Link Acquisition.

Bill Slawski’s Creating an SEO Content Inventory sparked the linkable asset inventory concept for us. That article includes a content inventory spreadsheet.

Another complication with discussing and sharing link building queries is that they’re often tailored towards the linkable and shareable assets of a particular organization. Further, two businesses within the same vertical may have widely different linkable assets, and therefore will need to seek different link targets, which requires different queries.

Despite their link-protecting reticence and the complexity of communication, the 21 link builders I surveyed delivered a highly-valuable array of advanced link building queries. Thank you to all who participated!

Framing the process

In my questions, I asked link builders to respond within this framework:

1. Linkable Asset. Definition: what’s “linkable” varies from vertical to vertical. Cash is almost always a linkable asset, as are available jobs, events, expertise for interviews and many other forms of great content.
2. Link Target. Definition: what types of sites, pages, and people seek this linkable asset?
3. Link Prospecting Query. Definition: what queries uncover great targets for your linkable assets?

This framework couldn’t possibly suit every link builders’ style and expertise. I mention it because you’ll see it in some cases below.

Last notes before digging in – I missed getting queries from some great link builders due to time constraints imposed by my late start (apologies to those I missed!). If you want more sample queries from link builders please say so in the comments (and/or add your own) so I can build the case for a follow-up article. And in closing, I’d like to extend a thank you to the SEO Dojo for their warm welcome and link query suggestions.

Link building queries from 21 link builders

Query #1

Ken McGaffin, Keywords and SEO Blogger for Wordtracker Academy:

Here is a mini case-study on our Firefox plug-in ‘SEO Blogger’ which shows how we create linkable assets, queries and approach people for link building.

The link building project

‘SEO Blogger’ Firefox plug in from Wordtracker

At Wordtracker, we wanted to target anyone who published a blog and we were especially interested in business bloggers. We did a reasonable amount of research on the project and it kicked off with doing queries on Google.

We were interesting in identifying sites that had published articles on ‘business blogging’ or advised people how to blog. We identified our prospects using “intitle” queries on Google.

At the last count, this piece of work netted us over 1,000 links in just a few months.

The queries we used were quite simple but they produced an excellent list of target sites.

Here are the queries I used:

• intitle:”business blogging”
• intitle:”business blogs”
• intitle:”blogging tips”

For each query, I’ll look at the first 100 results and then look to compile a list of what I think are the top 50 or so. I concentrate on the top 50 because it’s cost effective. If I get editorial coverage and links from among the top 50, then I know hundreds will follow their example.

You’ve got to have superb content and publicize it through multiple channels. That’s where we put in the bulk of our efforts. For ‘SEO Blogger’ we had a 7-step process:

1. Created a top notch, free plug-in.
2. We created a section on our Academy specifically to offer free blogging articles as well as a blogging download.
3. We also commissioned an e-book from Chris Garrett, “Blogging for Business” that would generate revenue.
4. About 4 days before launch, we contacted our top 50 researched targets, gave them some copy and invited them to be the first to try our new plugin – we asked them to write about it or tweet it if they found it useful. We gave people a strict embargo.
5. We wrote a series of customized press releases that went to the press list we’ve built up over the years. Note that we suggested how to link to us in all our communications.
6. This is the most important step – we responded to questions and queries almost immediately. That meant assigning people to take on that task. I’m convinced our quick responses helped build trust and relationships.
7. Finally, on release, we tweeted about the launch. Many of the bloggers journalists who we had contacted also tweeted at the same time. The results were fantastic – the synergy we got from these multiple channels is always what I’m after.

In summary,  I think you need to have a commitment to create great, free stuff in order to tap into these link targets.

Query #2

Shaun Anderson, of Hobo SEO Company in Scotland.

One of the simplest ways I use to build links for any business is finding colleges and universities who link degree students and alumni to to job opportunities, and promote their student discount partners online. I consider links from very real sites like these as authority building links.

Obviously the first thing to do is get used to publishing your job vacancies and any offers on your site, and then telling potential linking partners about them. TIP: never take these jobs offline either – just mention “Role Filled” and strike out the text.

• Target Asset = Job Vacancy / Internships For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = jobs degree site:.ac.uk, careers opportunities site:.ac.uk, careers advice site:.ac.uk, jobs degree site:.edu, careers degree site:.edu, careers advice site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Another variation of this query occurs with colleges and universities who publish links to sites that offer their alumni special student discounts (so effectively, all you need is a student discount for products or services). This is useful even for small businesses in a very tight catchment area.

• Target Asset = Student Discount For (with your important keywords of course)
• Key Link prospects = Universities and colleges, alumni sites
• Link prospecting queries (in Google) = student discount partners site:.ac.uk, student discount partners site:.edu + variations
• View this example page typical of what you might find.

Of course, in every case you need to dig around the site in question but offering a student discount to all colleges and universities and building a list of marketing communications offers at unis and colleges and contacting them asking for a link in their newsletter (which many have) in return for a student discount is going to be more rewarding than sending out 1000 unsolicited spam link request emails. TIP – don’t be cheap. The better your offer for students, the better chance you’ll get a link.

Ultimately these kinds of educational links are a win win – they are not hurting either site, and students get a good deal too. If you have good content on your site, you can just go right on and ask them to link to it if they already have a habit of linking out to similar sites to yours, or even send them articles about “How to get a job in {keyword} services” for their careers newsletter or resource section.

Query #3

Eric Ward, content link builder since 1994

Understanding how to use what Google will give you via advanced syntax queries is one of those private strategies where I don’t tell my exact approach, I only sort of hint at it. The specific queries I use are typically client/subject specific.

That said, I could share some vertical/marginally useful ones, say, if the content I am building links for is PBS’ content on volcanoes.

Then, an example target site would be this one.

And, I would have found that target site via a Google query string like this: [volcano learn diagram useful demonstration other links].

Now, this is a beautiful example, and it’s a real example, and it resulted in a topical link obtained, but…most folks who are building links are not doing so on behalf of PBS content about a vertical like “volcanoes”. So, while my example may look nice, and it worked for me because my clients are content creators like PBS, most folks will see my example and crucify me/it as being “unrealistic” for their purposes, since their content is not as “linkworthy” as PBS’s.

Query #4

Wiep Knol, newly of Linkbuilding.nl

Here’s a list of a few queries that I often use or have used in the past to find interesting websites. I left the most obvious ones out, because I assume that most people already know and use these.

Content targeted:

• {keyword} “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
• {keyword} “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
• {keyword} “write for us” OR “write for me”
• {keyword} inurl:category/guest

You can refine these queries by using {keyword location} in stead of {keyword}, or by switching to just {location}.

Resource/ research targeted:

• {keyword} “top * [tools/ articles/ websites/ etc.]” -> refine search to ~1 year ago. Contact anybody who shows up and ask if you can help with the 2009/ 20** edition of the article
• {keyword} research -> see explanation above
• {keyword} {location} resources OR “useful sites” OR links
• {keyword} {USP} intitle:resources -> Use ‘green’, ‘cheapest’ etc as USP
• .edu targeted: {keyword} site:.edu “planned research” OR “upcoming project” -> might return upcoming research/ project/ whatever that can be useful (both for info and for links)

To find specific types of websites:

• {keyword} “Powered by phpBB” OR “powered by vBulletin”
• {keyword} “Blog powered by TypePad” OR “powered by WordPress”

Additionally, one thing that always works very well for me is asking the client what the most important industry related websites and blogs are, and which ones his or her favorite are. Then I do some searching in the LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers of the client and some of his colleagues, and look for connections with these websites. If I find a match, explain to my client how he can use that connection and turn it into a link. This not only results in links to the client website on highly relevant websites that he likes (=a happy client), but it also makes sure that he is building connections that will be useful in the future as well (= life time value).

Query #5

Ann Smarty, SEO Consultant, SEOSmarty.com

• target asset = new low-calorie chocolate product
• key link prospects = mommy bloggers
• link prospecting queries = [pr welcome], [submit * review], [pr friendly], [pr contact], [pr info], [get * reviewed], [allintitle:get * reviewed], [reviews inurl:submit]

• target asset = a contest by fitness equipment store
• key link prospects = bloggers who cover web contests with a link back to the host
• link prospecting queries = [intitle:submit intitle:contest], [allintitle:submit * contest], [blog contests], [submit * giveaway]

Also from Ann: Link Building Search Queries Collection How to Use Google Wildcard Operator for Link Building and Baiting

Query #6

Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link, link building services and training

We begin all custom campaigns by sending surveys to the client’s customer base, which cuts our prospecting time in half and pinpoints the sites and/or types of businesses we need to look for. From there, it’s a simple matter of doing basic research to match sites with our client’s demographic. I depend less on queries for this and more on tools like Quantcast and Compete. If I do need to query, I use all four engines (Google, Ask, Yahoo and Bing) plus DMOZ, Hoovers, Lexis Nexis and local directories. My goal is to find businesses with street and algorithmic credibility to pitch my promotions and content to.

Query #7

Melanie Nathan, consultant for Canadian SEO

Footprints: A footprint is simply common text than can be searched for thereby revealing all the places that use the same text.

For example, a Google search for [Allowed HTML tags:] will bring back all the sites and blogs that allow you to use custom anchor text when commenting.

If you happen to come across an authoritative site that allows you to automatically post content with dofollow links (for example, a classified ad), take note of the form they’re using as footprints left by the form software are easily trackable and can allow you to find other sites that are using the same form.

Some examples of common footprints:

Dofollow blog comments:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["Notify me of follow-up comments?"+"Submit the word you see below:"]

Result: Over 60,000 new prospects (ie. sites that use the same dofollow form software)

Dofollow classified ads:

Corresponding Footprint search: ["drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC"]

Result: Over 40,000 other sites that use the same dofollow classified ad software.

Take it a step further with “drupal classified ads courtesy of exodus development, INC”+health and you’ve narrowed it down to only the sites that mention (for example) health.

Keep in mind that these are just 2 very basic examples. Get creative and you’ll be surprised at what you might uncover.

Disclaimer: I am in NO way suggesting that you spam these types of sites. However, if you’re going to spend the time interacting and engaging with other sites and blogs in your industry (for reals!), I AM suggesting that you maximize your efforts by making sure to interact on sites which will offer the most benefit to your organic goals.

Query #8

Wil Reynolds of the ThinkSeer SEO Agency

• Linkable Asset: A prize (product or service of course ;)
• Link Target: The target is charity web sites where we can give something away and be listed as an in kind donor
• Queries: ["in kind donations" list], ["in kind donors" list]

Query #9

Tom Demers of WordStream, the keyword management software company responsible fora free keyword tool.

A couple of things I’m frequently promoting are videos and free tools or widgets. Here I’ll use some pretty generic queries like:

• target asset = Video Content
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} videos], intitle:[{target keyword} clips]

• target asset = Free tool/widget
• link prospecting queries = intitle:[{target keyword} tools], intitle:[free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of free {target keyword} tools], intitle:[list of {target keyword} tools]

Then I’ll use SEO for Firefox to export the data and de-dupe and triage the link prospects based on PageRank.

Beyond just pulling down places linking out, you can also identify a few sites that are on multiple lists. From there, pull down their backlink profiles and sort by page rank (using SEO for Firefox) or find sites that are linking to them multiple times using the Hostname Occurrence Counter. At the end of the process I usually have a nice list of potential link profiles.

Query #10

Gab Goldenberg of SEORoi.com

For queries,  I try to find less commercial sites based on insider jargon, insider topics or thinking about communities. So if you are kindergarten related, I’d look up jargon related to parenting or issues like whether you should carry your kid in a sling or if strollers are better. This works better for B2C than B2B, since I can’t see professionals being up for selling links on their sites, vs the general public. I could be wrong though.

For prospects, I target bloggers, members of the said communities.

Building links to B2C sites that can have a related community. It’s harder when you’re selling stuff like toothpaste or ordinary drugstore items without associated communities.

The upside to this is that if you have the budget, you can saturate the key sites in the community with these paid links and build a brand. In which case, you can thumb your nose at Google because you’ll eventually build direct traffic as a key source as well as referral traffic, reduce their ability to penalize you, etc. I wrote somewhere about my friend Rachel who surfs Wikipedia for entertainment. That’s where you want to get to. Where people bypass Google to get to you directly. It’s ironic, but the best SEO will get you to the point you don’t need search traffic any more.

Check out Gab’s 101-tip guide to buying text links.

Query #11

Arnie Kuenn of Vertical Measures link building service.

Here are a few for you that I have saved in a our database of queries we use for link building:

• “keyword phrase” sponsor charity
• “public library” “useful links” keyword phrase site:.gov
• “useful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “helpful keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “favorite keyword phrase sites” library –clientwebsite site:.edu
• “best keyword phrase” site:.edu OR site:.org
• keyword phrase resources public library site:.us
• keyword phrase site:.edu

Query #12

Members of the Huomah SEO Dojo, SEO Training for Search Warriors.

Many thanks to the fine community at the SEO Dojo for their contributions to this article!

member: fedem of Posicionamiento y SEO.

• linkdomain:competitor1.com; linkdomain:competitor2.com; -linkdomain:mysite.com

This will give you a landscape of which sites are linking to 2 or 3 of your competitors but not your site. This increase the chances of finding partners willing to link to your site.

Query #13

Ken Lyons of WordStream.

I use search operators to find personal email addresses for link outreach. some of my favorites:

• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + email
• site:[companywebsite.com] + [name] + contact
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + email
• site:[personalblog.com] + [name] + contact

From 12 Ways to Find Anyone’s Personal Email Address

Query #14

Craig Parker of Soula.com

Social Media Based queries are obviously useful for commenting and scoping out competition so: site:{SN} {keyword}

Where SN (social network) is digg.com, delicious.com or twitter.com etc. and {keyword} is one of your keywords or brands/competitor brands.

The other one I find quite useful is narrowing down themed directories so:

• {keyword} + “add a site”
• {keyword} + “submit url”

Obviously there are literally loads of combinations of these utilizing different words for directory i.e. “suggest url” or “submit listing”

You can also combine it with the intitle or inurl command for extra fun! Again throw in different words for directory like “list” and you can make lots of combinations on this.

• {keyword} + “intitle:directory”
• {keyword} + “inurl:directory”

They are basic ones but can be often overlooked by those not used to this stuff.

Query #15

Jon Santillan of SEO Dubai

I used search operators to find potential links for my link building campaign using footprinted Scripts. This varies from directory, blog commenting, forum, social media directories and competitors.

• Target Asset = Red Widget
• Strategy – A combination of standard text or content that usually can see in a website
• Ex: Directory = inurl:submit.php intext:Powered by “Directory Name” intext: red widget
• Blog Commenting = intext:red widget intext:blog comments powered by “Comment Plugin”
• Social Media = intext:”Submit A New Story” intitle:Register intext: “Name of Social Media Script”
• Forum = inurl:forum intext:red widget

My favorite: Competitors Footprints. Following competitors Backlinks is the most exciting one, you can use link:competitorsdomain.com and check a potential link partner. By following competitors footprints, you can sometimes see the strategy of their link building, for example, if they are using Directory, Blog Commenting, Social Media or Forum. If by any chance you got the name of a Directory Script, Social media script, plug commenting plugin that is not in your list, you can add that in your arsenal.

Once you have figured out the competitors pattern how they are building their backlinks plus your link building strategy I think that will be easier for you.

In my opinion, combining different search operators and website content pattern is one of most effective link building strategy you just need to be more creative to combine and try different combination.

Query #16

Navin Poeran

I’m using advanced queries in combination with Google alerts, to receive mails, whenever there is somewhere i can drop a link.

I just create a new alert with: OR -mysite.com inurl:links

Query #17

Andy Murd of MMMeeja.

I use this query in Google Image Search to find the little “U Comment – I Follow” logo:

• “MY KEYPHRASE” inurl:ifollow*.gif

For deep links to your blog posts, you can add “CommentLuv Enabled” to find the popular WordPress plugin.

I make RSS feeds from link-building searches so my feed reader nags me to post a few comments per day.

Query #18

David Harry (The Gypsy) of the Huomah SEO Blog

When reverse engineering link profiles, we use stuff like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com site:.com "SEO Blog"]
• linkdomain: – searches for links to Huomah.com
• Site; – tells it to look for results from ‘.com’ extensions.
• “SEO Blog” searches the KWs on the page (or hopefully in the anchor text)

Or

• [linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "keyword"]
• [linkdomain:example.com site:.gov " keyword"]

Or maybe if we’re looking for relevant pages, we can track the TITLE

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:SEO]

Page URLs are strong also, so we might do something like:

• [linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com inurl:"search engine optimization"]

We also can use a variety of low level link trolling with dorks related to:

• [add-links, last-updated 2000 inurl:.edu]

Query #19

Julie Joyce, of the link development firm Link Fish Media

“You can find particularly interesting sites geared towards a very specific interest, by using an organic thought process in which you have no major agenda. This all sounds very New Age but it has led us to some of our best inbound links.

I’ll give you an example for this one, since it’s the only method that isn’t exactly what it sounds like. When working for a site that sells punk rock concert videos, we may search for “punk videos” to start with, then we’ll see a long-tailed search phrase somewhere down in the SERPs on page 3, so we’ll then type that phrase in, then click on the first result, see something on the site’s homepage that triggers an idea, and we’ll end up on a fan site that is devoted to the music of Stiff Little Fingers.

We see that this site seeks to list all online stores that happen to sell Stiff Little Fingers items, and our client has one of these sites. Therefore, it’s a great place to get a link, and it was a somewhat random method of discovery. It’s also relevant but we still go about it in a slightly more haphazard way.”

Excerpted from: 6 Discovery Methods For Finding Ideal Linking Partners

Query #20

Brian Gilley of SocialSEO.com

Drupal Powered Websites (most allow comments links and/or dofollow)

Targeting Drupal sites with the keyword phrase “home mortgages” with comments turned on and that allow HTML links to be added and are almost always followed.

Want to get more specific and search for the keyword in the title. Try the “intitle:” search operator on for size.

Want to get freaky with it and go the broad route and not including Drupal websites or any specific CMS platform? Just search for sites allowing the HTML tag, which usually means a followed link and brings up endless possibilities.

See more tips from Mr. Gilley on how to find backlinks with search queries.

Query #21

Brian Chappell, Search/Social Marketer

Finding people who will want to share your content (…including linking to it…) can be much simpler if you know how to search quickly through the major social networks.

• Linkedin: [site:linkedin.com inurl:in "social media expert"]
• Bebo: [site:.bebo.com inurl:profile inurl:bebo "social media expert"]
• CafeMom: [site:www.cafemom.com inurl:cafemom.com/home/ "stay at home mom"]
• Facebook: [site:facebook.com/people "led zeppelin"]
• Flickr: [site:flickr.com/people "@gmail"]
• Twitter: [site:twitter.com -inurl:statuses -inurl:status "social media expert"]
• MySpace: [site:profile.myspace.com inurl:myspace inurl:fuseaction "go to nc state"]
• YouTube: [site:youtube.com/user "social media expert"]

From: How to Target Users within Social Networks

Additional link query resources:

Two Link Prospecting Query building tools:

• SEOBook Link Suggest Tool
• Link Search Tool by SoloSEO

10 Articles on Advanced Queries for Link Building

1. Long List of Link Searches
2. Five Search Queries to Find Sponsorship Link Opportunities
3. 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
4. Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks
5. The Power of Search Queries for Link Building: The Basics and Beyond Part 2
6. Link Building Tip: Easily Find DoFollow Blogs Search String
7. Search Engine Query Cheat Sheets
8. Google Hacks for Dorks and SEO prowlers
9. Getting Links From Known, Quality Linkers
10. Eric Ward Queries from Print Search Marketing Standard Interview

Aim for the middle and create content that:

Here’s how:

• Content must appeal to your market: the audience of potential buyers
• Content must attract links from relevant, influential sites
• Content topics must sell your company

Content must appeal to your market: the audience of potential buyers

This is the sphere in which linkbait, in its “purest” form, often misses the mark. Especially when folks target Digg and other mass market distribution networks for attention acquisition. Building links with content that isn’t relevant to your target market can lead to brand confusion and short, ineffectual visits. Though you may not always “get links quickly” through creating and distributing content that appeals to your target market, you ensure an experience that resonates with your company’s brand, values and capacity for meeting your market’s needs.

The core task of appealing to your market with content is to understand its needs. Thinking about market needs in terms of content, and not goods or services – can sometimes prove tricky. Here are some thoughts to get you started.

Your content must:

1. Help meet an aspect of your market’s needs through information or guidance
2. Remain relentlessly factual and helpful (think engagement if you’re a lifestyle brand)
3. Target key stages of the buy cycle

Recommended approach

Ask your customers what online (and offline)  publications they read. Ask why. Then research these publications and see who’s advertising – if the advertisers are players in your space, this is an indicator that you’ve found a relevant site. Identify what kinds of content gets published there, and the questions this content answers. Could you tailor content to fit here?

Revisit your FAQs and emailed questions – what gets asked over and over? These concerns represent the needs of your market and could provide you inspiration.

Any questions that repeatedly come up in forums and Q/A sites can represent your market’s needs as well.

Content must attract relevant links from targeted sites

Addressing your market’s needs with informative content increases the likelihood that it will be linkworthy. However, just because a piece is informative doesn’t mean it will be highly-linkable. It’s important that your content appeals to the most important and influential linkers in your space. This means you need to determine who these individuals are, and identify what gets them linking. The good news is that if your content meets market needs, then you’re well on your way. The bad news is that your 10 tips article might be 90 tips short of earning you lots of links.

Recommended Approach

1. Research your space and identify what content types and topics frequently attract links.
2. Conduct SERPs Analysis Research to see which sites shows up frequently. These websites that frequently occur in the SERPs may lead you to an understanding of “highly-linkable” for your space.

Keep an eye out and a spreadsheet open to capture information such as:

• Which bloggers, media and other publishers appear the most often in your target SERPs?
• Which bloggers, media and other publishers link most frequently to your competition? Why?
• Are there key informational resource pages that appear frequently in the SERPs?
• Write down contact information for the sites that appear to be influential in the SERPs and the market.

Content must create leads or fulfill other business objectives

Creating linkable content that meets your market’s needs is a good start, but you must be sure to sell your company. Please don’t take this as encouragement to pitch your products and services, but rather to write on topics that illustrate your professional competence, domain of knowledge, authority of expertise along with the core values of your organization. If you’re writing to meet market needs, then you’re likely going to demonstrate your capacity to meet them. You may find that in the process of communicating the values that make your organization distinct you end up with content that’s more linkable and more likely to generate leads anyhow.

Brainstorm content topics that:

1. Demonstrate or illustrate authority of knowledge space (thought leadership)
2. Illustrate core values of service/product and company
3. Demonstrate capacity to deliver results
4. Demonstrate core competencies
5. Remain relentlessly factual
6. Describe the process of inventing or making your processes or services.

Next steps: publish content onsite; place content offsite

Publishing your linkable, branded content onsite, combined with link request outreach, generates links. We also recommend, as this article demonstrates, placing content offsite for the purposes of generating relevant traffic, qualified leads, link equity and the benefits of brand association. If you know of sites that engage your target market with content that answers their concerns, we highly recommend that your content appear there. Striking a balance between on and off-site publication is an ongoing balancing act, as demonstrated by colleagues such as Aaron Wall, Eric Ward and Debra Mastaler.

Here’s how in five steps:

1. Identify link prospects suitable for outreach
2. Gather information and tools for link building outreach
3. Craft effective link building outreach emails
4. Manage the 4 possible responses: Accepts, Declines, Counters and Ignores
5. Add value to future outreach efforts: 17 trackable data points

Step 1. Identify link prospects suitable for outreach

We assume at this point that you’ve already prospected and qualified a list of link opportunities for your site. Not every link prospect on that list will be suitable for such extensive link building outreach as described below. Directories, for example, are one type of link opportunity that typically don’t require specialized outreach or negotiation. Here are six examples of link opportunities that require more finesse.

Requesting resource additions to previously-published lists and roundups

Finding lists and roundups related to your subject matter can be as simple as adding the word “list” or “roundup” to your link prospecting queries. If you’re building links to a new Twitter-related app, you should have no problem finding previously published lists written by folks who may add your site. If you’ve written some highly-linkable content, we hope you paid attention to the content already mentioned on lists and roundups pages. Now, when you reach out to these prospects you have a much higher likelihood of earning a link.

Suggesting new, alternative page for now-dead links

Using a broken-link finding tool you may be lucky enough to discover a formerly valuable page of content that was widely linked, but has since gone dead, out of date or now contains only affiliate links. If this formerly useful page contained relevant content that your target market would find useful, it makes sense to research, rewrite and reach out to folks who linked to similar content.

Requesting that company mentions become live links

If your company or organization is written about frequently, then consider making a link request to sites that mention you favorably but don’t link. Majestic SEO data can help you to identify the pages on which your site or company is mentioned, but not currently linked to.

Inclusion in actively curated resource aggregations

In the days before the Yahoo directory (and long before Google) individuals curated lists of links (such as library resource pages) that helped users find their way into deeper knowledge of a hobby, industry or practice. Some of these folks remain, still actively curating and aggregating the best information in their space, and typically all from one page. If your industry is blessed with such curators, then it’s worthwhile seeking links for high quality, highly-linkable content.

Seeking mention in upcoming industry coverage/story roundups

If the media (bloggers, industry news sites, etc) in your market consistently point to new resources, then outreach can prove highly-valuable. Look especially for bloggers who create roundups of latest news and resources.

Identify upcoming information needs

While conducting outreach, especially linkable-content outreach to industry media, it’s wise to ask them about any upcoming info needs they may have. This runs the gamut from potential data needs for analytical verticals, expert input/executive access for news sites, to guest posts for high-traffic, high-trust, highly-relevant blogs. If you haven’t yet created highly-linkable content, this approach can help you begin building great links if you have sought-after expertise in your organization.

Step 2. Gather information and tools for link building outreach

Preparation is key to an efficient outreach campaign. Though the level of outreach customization we recommend makes automation impossible, there are many bits and pieces of information you can gather that will help you streamline your process.

The link building outreach worksheet

A link building outreach worksheet (you can download one here to use as a template) is the second-most valuable outcome of a link building campaign, placed just after the links themselves. By capturing appropriate and relevant data, you can make all your future efforts more effective. This worksheet should include the following items:

• Qualified link prospects suitable for high-touch outreach – Add your link prospects to column one in the Link Building Outreach Worksheet (linked above).
• Title + URL(s) you’re building links to – Having these handy, all in one place, means you don’t have to scramble for them when you’re crafting your outreach pieces. It might occur to you that a given prospect may be interested in more than one piece of content. Keep them in one place for the duration of a campaign for easy reference.
• List of potential link offers - Can you offer highly-linkable content? Data? White papers? Expert access? Free tools? Offers in this article refer to anything you’re trying to exchange for links. Some offers, such as data or access to executive insight may not involve your current URLs. Some offers may not involve URLs that your client/boss initially requested you build links to. Brainstorm as many offers as possible before you begin outreach so that you can be flexible and even spontaneous while writing your outreach.
• A range of ideal keywords for anchor text – Know your ideal anchor text keywords and use them when describing your offers. Request that people use them, but only if you’ve developed rapport that makes the request appropriate. In unpaid, organic link building asking for specific keyword anchor text can be like adding a favor on top of a favor. Sometimes you just have to be happy with what you get. That said, it’s worth knowing and using your anchor text in your outreach. In those rare, high-control situations, use anchor text that aligns both with the content on the page and the page on your site you’re linking to. If you sell electronics and you’re requesting a link on a page about iPods, link to your iPod page with iPod in the link text.
• Descriptive snippets of the core value/benefit of URLs – Go into the outreach phase with a bulleted list of the core value/benefit of your offers. This is not for you to copy and paste, but rather to guide and inspire you when writing your individual outreach emails. This enables you to better align your requests with the values you perceive in the folks you’re writing to.
• Contact info and qualifications for internal experts – If you’re a go-getter, well positioned in your company and/or have gotten proper authority, then having contact info for your organization’s internal experts and executives can make outreach for links much more fruitful. Make sure all the names are spelled correctly and that you do indeed have the correct contact information.
• Working knowledge of company history and key founders – Sometimes a basic knowledge of company history and its key founders can help you to craft stronger outreach emails. This might be something you recognize you need after a couple hours of outreach. Have it handy and be ready to work it into your outreach to better demonstrate your organization’s authority and link-worthiness. For example, knowing that your organization’s CEO founded and still chairs a notable industry association could be compelling information to include in your outreach.
• Preparedness to identify needs not expressed in your current range of link offers – You can’t really stockpile this, but remember that link building combines equal parts prep work, perspiration and perspicacity. Preparing for sudden insights can be as simple as the “notes” column in your outreach worksheet. Sometimes it can mean adding a long-shot request in the form of short P.S. such as “hey would you guys be open to a guest post?” There’s something about being in the thick of an outreach campaign that opens the creative mind to other possibilities and potential opportunities. Make sure you watch for and capture any patterns or trends as you revisit and act on your link opportunities.

Step 3. Crafting link building outreach emails

Your email brings all the pieces together, preferably with a dose of value proposition, customization and spontaneous observation. There are several “moving parts” in email outreach such as the email address you send from, subject line and opening line of the email. Tracking and optimizing these parts can lead to higher link acquisition rates.

Link outreach subject lines

Email marketing has studied the science of subject lines since the beginning of the tactic. In link building outreach, first pay attention to email subject lines that compulsively make you open them. Then think about conveying the core benefit of your link offer in the subject. Further, consider whether or not it makes sense to carefully include your anchor text to pre-seed the potential linker’s thinking. For example, while conducting outreach in a media space with lots of blogs and numerous weekly resource roundups, we included variations on “Great Roundup Material.” But only to bloggers who actually published roundups, as demonstrated by site: searches or just a quick ctrl+f of the home page. We also recommend tracking subject lines in case you can discern a lift in eventual conversions when using certain words or offers. For a bit more about subject lines, check out Subject Line Best Practices and Crafting a Must-Read Email Subject Line.

Using customized opening lines

Sincere compliments. Relevant, insightful observations. Sincere gratitude for the work they put into their site. New ideas. Tech-error discoveries. Shared personal experiences. Questions. There are many paths to a powerful opening line for your link building outreach email. To keep things focused, I typically lean on observations that relate to the core value of the URL I’m requesting links to. If seeking links to a resource piece on saving money, I’d admire the money-saving prowess exhibited by other content pieces on the site, then transition to the request based on shared value. For deeper perspective on opening lines, go and read Opening The Sale.

Demonstrating value

What benefit will adding your link bring to their visitors? This is the key question that any publisher will ask. First and foremost, think about conveying your URL’s value in terms of saving time or saving money; illustrate how your URL does either or both. Other benefits can include having early information, becoming more thorough and resource-inclusive, so visitors have a better sense of all their options, and providing a novel or extreme experience worthy of a brief break from work. Values to your link publisher might include the perception of affiliation, building the perception of “connections,” and your potential for distribution and linking reciprocation if it makes sense. Bear in mind that there is much to leverage in any link building outreach campaign.

Our link building outreach roundup below contains several links to resources on the actual outreach email. We highly recommend you read them all.

Step 4. Managing the 4 possible responses

We’ve identified four primary outcomes for any link request: accepts, declines, counters and ignores. The value in identifying these outcomes upfront is that you can prepare for them.

Accepts offer ways to grow the relationship

We hope that you view a link as just the beginning of a relationship. Here are some ideas on growing link relationships from initial accepts. Please add any others you have found effective to the comment section below.

• Send a thank you for linking email
• Ask about any content/information needs
• Ask about any what distribution help they may need
• Request an interview with their resident expert
• Request a review
• Offer them a subscription to your newsletter, blog feed or twitter account
• Subscribe to their newsletter, blog feed and/or twitter account
• A simple: How do you think my/our knowledge could help?

Declines: ways to grow beyond the “No”

A no, that is, an emailed response in which someone rejects your request, is fairly rare. They’re valuable though because they show that someone actually considered your request and then further offered you the consideration to respond. Your job now is to learn how to grow this no into a future yes in a way that doesn’t irk your rejector. We suggest:

• Keep a gracious, scientifically curious mindset
• Identify their objection
• Learn what content they WOULD link to, but keep questions short and sweet
• Gently seek a commitment: “So if I/we do XYZ, you would link to it if/when we add it to our site?”

If you can learn what content they would link to, congratulations – now you have a content idea for your next blog post!

Counters are rare, but be prepared

Counters, in which your link prospects state what they require in order for you to earn a link from them, are even more rare than a “no.” However, they do happen. Cash and reciprocal links are fairly common counters. Be prepared with other offers such as coupons, discount codes for their readers, products for review, etc, and be ready to approach your client or boss to negotiate for this particular link if it’s worth it.

Ignores: know when to say when

An ignore can mean many different things. Maybe your subject line isn’t as effective as it could be. Maybe your prospect is on vacation. Maybe you pitched your URL ineffectively. For whatever reason, you got no response. When following up with an ignore, we always make sure to write a new comment or observation in the opening. In some cases, we mention who else has linked or tweeted the URL as a way to indicate that others found it valuable. If it’s an especially juicy link, then sometimes we may look for other contact info on the site. Tread lightly, though: if they’re deliberately ignoring you, you may be spamming them!

Step 5. Add value to future outreach efforts: 17 trackable data points

Second to the links you earn from outreach, the data you gather and retain delivers you the most recurring value in any link building campaign. Track relentlessly, especially on large-scale outreach projects, and you’ll find that each successive outreach campaign you conduct will be that much easier. We’ve identified 17 trackable data points and include these in our Link Building Outreach Worksheet. There are more, but these should help get you started.

1. Targeted Hostname/Link Page
2. Contact’s Name
3. Email Address
4. Date of 1st Contact
5. Date of Follow Up
6. Link Placed? Y/N
7. URL of Placed Link
8. Date Link Placed
9. Linked URL
10. Anchor Text Used
11. Site Type
12. Email Subject Line
13. Opening Line
14. Offer Made
15. Growing the Relationship
16. Twitter Address
17. Notes

Bonus tips for advanced link outreach

For those of you who made it this far, why not take your link building outreach a little further? Here are some additional tools and resources to check out before embarking on your next outreach campaign.

Relationship management applications

There are a number of emerging link building relationship management tools emerging. Here are all the companies (to our knowledge) in this exciting space. We have not yet extensively tested any of them in our link building outreach, despite our enthusiasm.

• BuzzStream
• Raven
• SearchReturn
• BuzzGain

15 more link building outreach articles

We consider the following articles and resources to be required reading. There are enough situational tips and nuanced suggestions in the links below to inform link request pros and newbies alike.

• Divide and Conquer: Creating and Managing Your Link Campaign
• What Your Link Request Should Contain and Why
• The Perfect Link Request
• The Perfect Link Request Email Template
• The Best Link Request Email Yet
• Bad Link Requests: Get Your Targeting Right
• A Resource Guide to Writing Quality Link Requests
• The Do’s & Don’ts in Link Request Emails
• How NOT to Request a Link Via Email
• Link Building Etiquette
• How to Request a Link Without Sounding Like a Spammer
• Why your link exchange request failed (and what you can do instead)
• Email is Still the Key to a Successful Link Building Campaign
• Good SEO: How to Request Links From Picky Sites
• How Getting a Link is Like Picking up a Woman

Here, we’ll provide a process and tools for developing and distributing linkable content, based on the content that has proven to attract links in your target keyword space. You should be able to answer these questions using the accompanying tools for your market:

• What content topics receive the most links?
• What are the attributes of the most-linked content?
• Who is the “linking audience” of your keyword space?
• Who links the most frequently to content in your keyword space?
• What are the attributes of mid-linkable content?
• What reoccurring topics and themes suggest possible content directions?
• What content is missing (eg: top 10 or 100 lists, resource collections)?
• Who links to topics similar to content you’ve already created?

Now that you know what you’re looking for, it’s time to begin the linkable content research phase. In this article, we investigate the link building content space using two keywords: [link building] and [link building blog]. Though we’re pretty familiar with the space, we’re going to approach it as if we were not.

Here are the tools we recommend for this exercise:

• The Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet (3rd Download)
• URL Occurrence Counter Tool + SERP Dominators Analysis Guide
• The Link Qualification Worksheet + Guide
• Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE)
• SEO for Firefox

Process for gathering linkable content data for analysis

Read through the process first and then follow along from home with your Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet.

Step 1. Identify the top information sources in your keyword space

First, you must identify which content is considered most valuable in your target keyword space. Our [link building] example is fairly simple because so many people have written so much about it. If you’re in a less-discussed content space, you may need to look at more keywords, or perhaps look at more informational keyword phrases [how to + target keywords].

Google search: [link building] Google search: [link building blog]

You could also use the URL and Hostname Occurrence Counter Tool on the SERPs of resource oriented queries for finding more of your top info sources. Further, we’ve used the blogrolls of highly-prominent bloggers as a starting point for analysis of unfamiliar spaces. The goal here is to find your industry’s most prominent, important and trusted resources.

Step 2. Extract resources from the Top 20 results

Next, you’ll need to extract non-salesy resource URLs and hostnames from the top 20 results. You’re looking for how-to resources, thought pieces, entertainment pieces – anything that’s ranking and doesn’t have a “buy now” button on it (unless of course, you’re investigating highly-linkable product pages).

Capture both sub-pages and hostname results from the resources you find. Any sub-page titles and URLs can go right in your worksheet. Use SEO for Firefox to find and record inbound link count to these pages into sheet 2, the Highly-Linked Content sheet.

For each of these sub-pages (and only the sub pages, we don’t want site-wide inbound links here) export the inbound links as detected by Yahoo. Paste these inbound links into the “link tank” sheet of the Linkable Content Worksheet (sheet 4).

Also, be sure to copy and paste out the hostname of the sub-pages that appear. For example, the URL for Aaron Wall’s How to Build Links Fast: 101 Tips & Strategies (#1 for [link building]) looks like this: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml. You’d want to record that URL on sheet 2, and the hostname, www.seobook.com onto sheet 3.

Copy the hostnames into sheet 3 – they need more processing.

Step 3. Identifying linkable content from the top resource domains

Take your top hostnames and explore them with Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE). In our experience, YSE shows pages from sites *roughly* in the order of the number of links that they have acquired. In a new tab, open up 10 or 15 pages that appear high in the list and that have promising titles.

For example, here’s Debra Mastaler’s old blog in YSE. The second page listed is her classic Help! I’m New, I Need Links, What Can I Do? post. Using the SEO Toolbar, we can see clearly that this particular page has 260 inbound links. This article is clearly a giant of the link building content space and so title, URL and inbound link count all went into our work sheet. Next, we export the 260 inbound linkers to her article and paste them into sheet 4 – many of these links are from people who appreciate high quality content, and we want to get to know them better.

From the first page of YSE for Ms. Mastaler’s blog, we can see a number of articles – to keep this exercise manageable by hand, we only selected the top 10 or so. For more thorough linkable content analysis, you could go to 20, 30, or even export the top 1000 results into a TSV file if you’ve got the tools, time and talent to handle that much data.

To reiterate: copy title, URL and inbound link count into sheet 2 of the Linkable Content Analysis Work Sheet. Copy inbound links (only inbound links) to that URL, excluding the domain itself – into sheet 4, the link tank.

Repeat hostname analysis with YSE until you’ve worked through your list of hostnames (from sheet 3) that appeared in the top 20 results for your keywords.

Linkable content analysis and strategy creation

Once you’ve gathered your highly-linked content and the pages that link to it in the Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet, you can begin the work of identifying your linking audience and charting out your content creation strategy.

What topics receive the most links?

When you sort your Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet based on number of inbound links, you’ll easily determine the “big head” of linkable content. We put 58 pages into our Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet based on the two searches above, along with the processes outlined. The top 5 most-linked content breaks down like this:

• 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website (2760 IBL)
• Link Building Wiki (864 IBL)
• Link Value Factors (608 IBL)
• Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009 (408 IBL)
• Five Link Building Strategies that Work (362 IBL)

(Congrats, Wiep…you showed up twice!)

Now, even if we were new to the industry, we’d know some of the most-linkable documents within its keyword space.

What are attributes of the highest-linkable content?

What exactly makes these 5 articles the most-linked articles within the keyword space of [link building] and [link building blog]? That’s the question of a good linkable-content strategist! While we have our own ideas based on our experience in link building and SEO content in general, here are some things you could measure if you were new to a space:

• Core topic
• Number of words
• Reading level of content
• Embedded media (images, video, podcast, etc…)
• Outbound links on the page? Are they reciprocal?
• Scope/thoroughness of content
• Information structure (top 10 list, “ultimate guide,” info aggregation, etc…)
• Apparent target audience
• Apparent target audience skill level (basic or advanced?)
• What stage of the buy cycle does it target?

Look for patterns that might be significant for your space. For example, when it comes to link building content, it appears that having large numbers in the title may incite links. These large numbers (101 and 69) further indicate that the linking audience for this content prefers thorough coverage, and a quick read shows this to be true. A quick comparison of word count for each of the top-linked pages shows an average of over 4000 words per article, with 2000-3000 being the most represented. That’s a lot of words for one article.

We would not recommend that everyone begin writing content pages that are 3000 words long. But we would recommend that everyone check out the attributes of highly-linkable content in their keyword space (including but not limited to word count) and consider that as a starting point.

Who is the “linking audience” of your keyword space?

By now, sheet 4 of your Link Qualification Worksheet should contain a powerful audience of inbound linkers – people who link to specific, high value sub-pages and not just the home page. Begin looking for opportunities to build relationships with the owners/operators of these sites. Ideally, they become a vital part of how you distribute your content and build links.

Your opportunities may look like:

• Guest posts (note: this article is a “guest post” on SEL)
• Blogroll link requests, blogroll link exchanges
• Add to RSS for comment conversation participation
• Contributions to existing resource pages
• Contributions to email newsletter
• Distribution through Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Etc…

For more thorough link prospect qualification, follow the process outlined in “Qualifying Link Prospects for Relevance, Value and Potentiality.”

Who links the most frequently to content in your keyword space?

Conduct a host name co-occurrence analysis of your inbound linking URLs from sheet 4 using the Hostname Occurrence Tool. Paste your results into sheet 5.

The sites that occur the most frequently are the sites that link out most often to highly linkable content. Those with a higher value as measured by the Link Qualification Worksheet and that demonstrate a high propensity for linking typically represent the most important sites for establishing a relationship. Sites that link frequently but don’t display a high value metric may be sources of quick and easy links that may not convey much search influence.

What are attributes of mid-linkable content?

Now remember, not all of your content needs to be a grand slam, or even a home run. Base hits are great. In our quick survey, we found 58 highly-linked URLs. By grouping and evaluating the mid-level players, it’s possible to identify a “linkable-enough” level of content, as well as a “core linking audience.”

Consider this: the top 5 most-linked articles will have links from sites not typically interested in link building. The sites linking to the top 5 will be less likely to link to other link building resources especially if they are more narrowly focused. The sites linking to articles with more moderate levels of inbound links are likely to represent a “core linking audience” of link building.

Our inquiry into 10 mid-linkable link building resources with 100 links or less showed Wiep.net and Search Engine Land, along with a high frequency of bookmarking and social sharing sites at the top, so not super fruitful unless you’re looking for social sharing and bookmarking sites.

What reoccurring topics and themes suggest possible content directions?

By spending some time with your Linkable Content Analysis Worksheet you can begin to tease out some potential article topics. What’s wonderful is that a) part of your research for the article is already done for you and b) once the article is done you’ll know exactly which sites to approach to share your new content and request links.

Based on our quick survey data, we identified a few topic trends, or reoccurring topics and themes. You can do this simply by looking at the titles. A more thorough dig would mean reading and categorizing all the highly-linked content in your space. We highly advise this.

Here are some examples of reoccurring topics we could now use for creating adjunct content, trump content, follow up commentary, etcetera.

Link bait

• Linkbait, Linkbait, Linkbait (170 IBL)
• Link Baiting: Which Hook Attracts the Right Fish? (125 IBL)
• Link Bait Kool-Aid? (61 IBL)

Directory analysis

• Is That Directory Worth Submitting To? (67 IBL)
• Hi I’m Debra And I’m A Directory Addict. (65 IBL)

Assessing Site Linkability

• What Makes a Web Site Link-Worthy? (95 IBL)
• Dude, Your Site Is Boring No Links For You (84 IBL)

When you pick the topic of your next article, create a Link Qualification Worksheet and add in all the pages linking to the resources that you use and cite. Further, let’s say we wrote an article on link bait. We could start with collecting inbound links to the link bait articles we found above, but then conduct some searches on [link bait] and [link bait guide] and gather backlinks to any high-ranking subpages. This article would look something like: 17 Ways to Accelerate Links to Your Link Bait (and Other Highly Linkable Content).

What content is missing?

Finding “missing link” content is easier if you have a good editorial sense and/or you know a space well. If you’re starting with content expertise in the woodworking space and want to create highly-linkable content in, say, the link building space, perhaps you’d begin with an article on link building tips for woodworking magazines (or forums, blogs, etc.).

If the content/keyword space you are investigating lacks massive numbers (100 ways; 1,000 tips…) then perhaps this could be a good direction too. Also, check if anyone has extensively aggregated the top resources in your space. Now that you’ve done all this research, you’re pretty well positioned to do so. Keep your eyes open and work to aggregate or trump what’s proven to attract links elsewhere in the space.

Ideally, the unique, informative content you’re creating also helps to sell a product or service your company offers. Can your content differentiate along the lines of your products and services? We think so.

Who links to topics similar to content you’ve already created?

If you’ve already created a body of content, look for article or content titles that suggest some similarity to yours. Visit the pages and see for yourself. Can your content compete on linkability? Further, does your content provide good counterpoint, or fill in missing material or viewpoints? If you think so, begin commenting, emailing or even calling linkers to simliar content and let them know that there’s more to the story.

Finally, for distribution, reach out to the sites that link frequently to top content in your space. Wiep puts outreach very nicely in The Perfect Link Request Email Template.

What’s missing from this article is a broader look at content marketing and how informative content can help you reach business goals. This article could compliment the research process for any content strategists seeking to add value to their content by making it more linkable and distributable by a target audience.