Every day it seems that there's a new tool out there to monitor, measure, track, and suggest what we should be doing. Many of these are free or offer free trials, which I love, but finding the time to test out a new tool in order to see if it suits you isn't always easy. My objective in using these tools is, of course, building links, so I'll go over the tools that I use and show you how I'd use them. And hey, they're all free!! For the record, I'm not interested in competitive analysis, analyzing sites, using social media (with one notable exception, and my exclusion here is only becaus [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

This week's tool review focuses on the Link Builder toolset from Wordtracker. Wordtracker has been around since 1998 and is most widely known as a keyword research tool. In 2010, they added Link Builder in response to consumer demand and to help their keyword customers with their link building efforts. Based in London, the Wordtracker staff is an international bunch, hailing from England, France, Italy, India, Australia and Ireland. To prove this,  CMO Ken McGaffin jokingly pointed out: I'm an Irishman, living in Scotland, working in London for an English company that does most of its [...]

Related Topics: Link Building: General | Link Week

The goal of most link building campaigns is to drive traffic to your site and get amazing rankings. However, consider this: with all the available social media channels where people will be engaging with your brand, why not view them with the same importance as your main site? What will happen if your site gets penalized, banned, hacked, or is cursed with loads of downtime? Sure, PPC is great for this, but what about everything else? "Ranking" well in other arenas can be a key way of soldiering on until your problem has been fixed. It can also open up some great avenues that lead to new [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

Increasingly over the years, search engines -- Google in particular -- have given more and more support to SEOs and publishers. But 2011 marked the first significant reversal that I can recall, with both linking and keyword data being withheld. Here's what happened, why it matters and how publishers can push back if Google and Bing don't change things. Where We Came From Some might believe that search engines hate SEOs, hate publishers and have done little over the years to help them. They are mistaken, either choosing to deliberately ignore the gains or, more likely, are simply unaware of [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Critics | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Link Building: General | Microsoft: Bing Webmaster Tools | SEM Industry: General | SEO: General | Top News | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Next up in our tool review series is Majestic SEO's suite. There are 4 levels of access with one being free (and limited) and the others being grouped by the amount of reports/access to their API needed. (Note: the free package may still require you to register in order to see a fuller dataset.) Paid plans range from £29.99 to £250.00 per month, excluding VAT (and for those of you not familiar with VAT, it's a value-added tax on the purchase price.) For our purposes here in Link Week, I'll be reviewing the Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighbourhood Checker, and Clique Hunter. Basic [...]

Related Topics: Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week | SEM Tools: Links