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 because that topic has been well covered both on this site and elsewhere) or examining existing backlinks. I’m interested in using these tools to help with finding new link sources and creating new content.

Also note, we don’t automate anything that we do. I know that we could (and probably should) but these are all tools that we use having that mindset. When we send out link requests, they’re usually pretty targeted so we spend lots of time upfront finding those sites. We aren’t interested in copying anyone’s link profile.

Our main timesuck is definitely discovery so any time I can find a cool tool to help with that, I love it. If you’re lucky enough to get things done through lots of automation, then I’m jealous, but if not, hopefully some of these tools can help you a bit.

For Link Outreach Generation

As much as I would love to totally streamline how we build contacts, I have not yet found a method that works for my link builders due to the way that we build links (it’s a bit old-school.) However, Buzzstream’s Blogroll List Builder is the closest thing I’ve found to being something that will work well for us.

It’s a very cool little tool that accepts a list of blog URLs and returns a downloadable list of blogroll links on those sites. If you have a good, relevant list of blogs to start with, this could definitely lead you to some cool sites and save time.

You still have to do your homework or you’ll be inundated with irrelevant sites, but this one is seriously promising.

For Search Term Discovery & Content Ideas

We have multiple clients and around 20 link builders/content team members so when it comes to discovery, we use many different methods. Some link builders prefer to just crawl around in the SERPs. Some like to sit down with a group and brainstorm.

However, the following tools are ones that we have found to be very useful in triggering new ideas for Google searches, anchor texts, guest posts, and new content for the sites we work on.

I’ve been using Wordtracker for a decade it seems. The Keyword Questions tool is really nice because once you enter your search phrase, it gives you a list of the questions people are asking about that topic and tells you how many times the questions were asked. This is great for helping you figure out what people want to know so that you can write about it.

After you do one search, you are asked to register but hey, it’s for a free account! You get 20 searches for the month so choose them carefully.

The Solo SEO Link Search Tool remains one of my favorites, as when you’re building links all day and you’re just dead tired, this tool makes more searches so easy. Just enter a phrase and it generates a list of more advanced search terms that link straight to the results in the engine that you select.

Pinterest: yes, it’s the latest fad and it can be a massive time waster, but if you use it correctly, you can get tons of great ideas for content. For those of us who like visuals, this has serious potential. If you choose to see what Everyone is pinning, you can drill down into more relevant categories.

Let’s say that I’m building links for a gardening site, so I’ll see what’s being pinned in Gardening. I see a ton of pins about seed bombs, which have interested me for awhile but we haven’t (theoretically) yet written about them on this imaginary gardening blog. Since 5 pins are different seed bomb photos that I see above the fold, this is a pretty good bet for me for my next post that will hopefully generate some links. I might also do some discovery for seed bombs to see if I can find good link targets.

Uber Suggest is powered by Google Suggest. You can select the language you want, whether you want to search the Web, news, or products, and get a downloadable text file. If you click on a result, you get deeper results and it’s all nicely alphabetized. This is great for discovery ideas for both pursuing link targets and generating ideas for guest posts and content.

Touch Graph allows you to visualize related topics. You put in a topic and it returns all kinds of related data such as phrases used for related searches and domains that are related. I think it’s especially good for tangential relevance (where something is related to something else in an indirect manner.) You can click on a graphed result and get related information for it, so the potential for drilling down here is fantastic.

Google’s BlogSearch can be particularly good for finding blogs so you can keep an eye on the homepage in case a new and relevant post pops up where you could get a link. If you’re using Google alerts, you might even set some up for the blogs that you see there.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is great for finding new keywords to use in search. I always come back to this one because I also do a bit of PPC for a client.

Soovle is getting a lot of attention and it should. You can get search results from Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Yahoo, Youtube, and Bing. Each result is linkable to the original source.

There’s also a link to the top daily internet keywords that’s alphabetized. This is fantastic for giving you ideas for popular searches you can use for discovery or writing content. There are also some “secrets” that are too numerous to include here but if you use this, check them out and see if they help. You can also choose different engines/sites to use for your search and customize this tool further for your needs, which is really nice.

In order to not rehash all I’ve said about free alerts I’ll suggest that you read an earlier post about that as it’s something that I highly recommend for keeping abreast on new potential link targets. It’s also a great way to see what your competitors are doing in case you’re missing a great opportunity.

Just for the record, this is a very small list of tools (that we’ve tested and like) that could work for you (for a bigger one look here). If you have something that you love that is free and useful for discovery, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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 business in the US.

In addition to its tools, Wordtracker has a popular SEO blog and a number of free instructional videos. Let’s take a look at some of the key elements behind Link Builder.

Getting Started

If you’ve read my previous link building tool reviews, you’ll know I am a stickler for detailed “how-to” instructions. I think it’s important these resources be well written and available in multiple formats so webmasters spend minimal time learning and more time linking.

In this regard, Wordtracker gets an A+. The video and written tutorials are the best I’ve seen so far and do an outstanding job explaining how each part of the tool works. I spent a total of 30 minutes watching the videos and reading tutorials, I found I only had to refer back to them one time during my test run, they are very well done.

Another plus for Wordtracker is the way it returns everything in real-time. You don’t have to wait days for data to accumulate or set up a profile manager, results come back almost immediately and in great depth. You have multiple choices in the way you can filter and categorize the data and there is a spreadsheet export function.

Like all linking tools I’ve reviewed, the key to this tool’s success is in the number and scope of keywords and competitive URL’s you use. The more, the better — so don’t skimp or overlook any of your keyword terms.

Start With A Keyword

You can begin your data collection by asking the tool to search on keywords or the URL’s of competitors. I picked the keywords “memory foam mattress” to begin my project.

I inserted my keyword phrase (1.) “memory foam mattress”, selected the country I wanted to target my results from (2.), added the name of my site so the report would show who was linking to my domain (3.) and set up a new file (4.)

Here’s what came back after a 90 second wait:

Over 20,000 results were returned as potential prospects, what you see highlighted in pink are links using the nofollow attribute. The results were seperated by “Strategies” (left column) or link type, this helps categorize the large amount of information returned and allows for further filtering.

I decided to select “News media” since it had the largest number of potential prospects (2774) and is one of my favorite categories to work in. I set the Filter option to return links using the term “mattress” in the anchor so I’d have a more focused set of results to work with.

In the first ten results returned for “News Media”, only one was a news outlet reporting on mattresses. Eight of the results were directories (see image above) and one result was comment spam using the term “mattresses” as a username.

The downside here is a lack of true media results, but on the other hand, I knew there were some solid directory leads returned in the run.

Still, I wasn’t thrilled with the listings and wondered if this was more a result of my keyword term being “non-newsy” or if the tool had a bug. So I ran a second phrase, “political candidates” which is definitely a more news worthy term and let the tool go.

I was right, the mattress term just doesn’t generate media mentions while the second politcal term does.

While the features and operations of this tool are solid, the fact it can only run a single term at a time makes it time consuming to use. If you’re running hundreds of terms or have multiple sites, I’m not sure this tool is for you.

On the other hand, if you’re a small business or have a dedicated linking staff and break your terms and/or sites out by single phrase, only being able to run one term at a time might not be an issue. The laser focus this tool forces you to have will help you run a targeted linking campaign and become well aquainted with your search engine results.

Contact View

Hands down, the best feature in this toolset is the Contacts View option, it pulls contact information off a webpage and organizes it in one spot.

After you’ve run your keywords and collected a list of prospects, save them to a “Targeted” list and engage the “Find contact data” option for each link.

The Link Builder tool then spiders each of the saved prospects by visiting the “About Us” and “Contact” pages on each site and pulling email, telephone, plus any Twitter and Facebook links it finds.

Once you’ve made contact with the site, you can record your actions in the Status box and have a record of what you’ve done and how the webmaster has responded.

If for some reason the Wordtracker spider can’t pull information off the About and Contact pages, there are live links in the account box you can click and pull the information from.

There is a little quirk with this option I would not have known about had I not read the tutorials. The Contact View option takes some time, while it runs you see a busy signal as the data loads. If it goes on too long, refresh the page and the results will display.

Again, if I hadn’t read the help section I could have become frustrated and wasted time contacting Support about this issue. Even worse, if I was using the tool in the trial or first 30 days, I may have cancelled my subscription thinking the tool had a bug. Take the time to read the tutorials carefully before you begin, they really do help.

Strategies

Link Builder offers a detailed written outline of tactics you can consider using, they correspond with the Strategy categories the tool pulls data to:

The strategy guide offers step-by-step instructions how to use the tool’s special features to build links. If you’re stumped for tactics or just want to venture into a new area to build links, this guide will help you get there. In addition to the Strategy guide, Link Builder has a library of link building articles you can peruse for ideas and insights.

Closing Comments

Like a lot of link building tools, Link Builder has its pluses and minuses. I like how the tool automatically highlights links using the nofollow attribute and I love the organization and functionality of Contacts View.

Link Builder is aesthetically pleasing, easy to use and has links to the help section on every page.

For many, this simple tool would be all they need to build links, a contact database and monitor competitors. While the simplicity is good for some, I can see the lack of programming, social media information and analyzing factors a hindrance for others.

The tool does not analyze quality, display PageRank or any other type of authority measure outside of ranking. Granted, knowing where a page ranks is the ultimate authority measure but having additional factors to look at is helpful. Ditto for having social media signals included, with these signals (supposedly) being written into the algorithms this SEO information is crucial for all webmasters large and small.

Link Builder does not offer the option to search on a term and utility phrase because of the way it sorts data.

For example, if I wanted to build a list of sites using the term “running shoes” and “add URL”, I would need to purchase a seperate tool as this function is not included in Link Builder. Having pages returned hosting the term “running shoes” is good, and separating those pages by topical category is helpful, but I still have to wade through thousands of results to determine how I can use them. If I know a page has a submission area on it, my search time is cut in half.

Another drawback as I see it pertains to its lack of programmability. Each time you want to use Link Builder you have to manually run it, there are no scheduling options or presets. Having instant results is great, but being able to generate a list of prospects in my sleep would be better.

If time is not an issue, you are new to SEO or you are a single site/small business owner with minimal social media interactions, Link Builder is an affordable tool option. I recommend signing up for the seven day trial and using all the features before buying a membership.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against infographics completely. I’d be hypocrite if I were because at 352 Media Group, we use them for our clients and ourselves. They do work — well. But more often than not, they fail— terribly.

I’m not saying we’ve done all of ours 100 percent perfectly, but that’s a key part of link building: learning from your mistakes and the mistakes of others, and then improving upon them.

So, in an effort to prevent you from making the same mistakes and maybe, just maybe, saving infographics before they fall off the deep end like Charlie Sheen, here’s what I’ve found to be the top reason why (most, not all) infographics utterly fail for link building.

Infographics Display Data That Sucks — Even In Picture Form

I blame infographics for dumbing us down even more than reality television. They expect that people won’t understand even the simplest data and put it in picture form that just complicates it even further.

Tom Morris said it best: “Did someone really sit down one day and think ‘you know, unless we have the market share of the iPad illustrated as a pie chart shaped as an apple, people will think this statistic is too dry’?”

Infographics and data visualization should make it easier to understand something. Credit Loan’s infographic on Obama’s economic stimulus plan did a great job at this.

Your infographic will fail if your data is terrible. What makes bad data?

• It’s dishonest, misleading or downright wrong.
• Wikipedia is your main source.
• It’s outdated (more than 12 months old).
• No one cares about the topic.

Infographic Design Is Abysmal

Yes, abysmal.

I thought we had finally realized that just because your cousin knows Photoshop, it does not make them qualified to design anything for your business. That doesn’t seem to be the case with infographics. If your infographic contains clip art, pie charts, bar graphs, or an abundance of typography, go back to the drawing board.

Think Brilliant did a great infographic about infographics that calls out some serious design flaws that are found on almost every visual representation. If you can’t find a creative way to design something, don’t design it at all.

Infographics Are Often Done By Questionable Companies

When buying links was popular, text link brokers were popping up to facilitate the process. Now, there are infographics providers who do the same thing. But when text link brokers started selling infographic services — because I can imagine their text link sales have dropped considerable over the past year — that was immediately a red flag.

Not all infographic companies are shady, so don’t write them all off. Look through some of their other work. If they also post statistics about how their infographics fared, even better.

Infographic “Promotion” Needs Promoting

When planning your infographic, if under “Promotion” you have “We’ll promote via social media,” you should be vanquished from the SEO club. Social media is not a strategy: It’s a tool, and infographics today aren’t using it properly.

Infographic promotion is not sending out a few tweets a couple of times a day to your 1,000 or so followers and hoping for the best, but that’s what it’s become recently.

Stumble Upon Paid Discovery gets you a couple of days worth of spikes in traffic, but won’t get you long-term results like you’re looking for with link building. If anything, it should be used as a supplement to your other promotion tactics.

Don’t just do a blogger outreach campaign casting a wide net with hopes to snag the Mashables, the Huffington Posts and the TechCrunches. First aim, then shoot.

Infographics aren’t all bad but enough of them have been done so blatantly bad that it has tarnished their reputation. And it should go without saying that if you do the opposite of all these things, you’ll have a solid infographic link building strategy at your hands.

Do you think infographics can be saved? What can people do to save them?

If not, Danny Sullivan eloquently covers it in detail in his post Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World“.  If you only read one post on the topic, that’s the one to read.

But this column is called Link Week, and, since as most of you know by now I have been helping content and content seekers find each other since way before Google existed, I could not be happier. I had just about given up on telling people their linking and content publicity strategies should not be too Google centric.

Putting all your eggs in the Google basket was, is, and always will be a strategic mistake. I’ll repeat once more the statement I make at conference after conference: If Google vanished tomorrow would you go out of business? If your answer is yes, you have been going about link building and content marketing wrong, and I’ll gladly debate anyone any time as to why.

As a side note, I get about 6 million pageviews a year to my site, and Google is responsible for less than 6% of those visits. And I rank in the top three for all my key terms. Google can disappear like D.B. Cooper and I’ll keep on truckin.

I’ve accomplished this over time by developing a collection of thousands of inbound links that point at the hundreds of articles and columns and webcasts about link building I’ve created.

I’ve also freely offered to write for the major search industry publications. What you call link bait today we called sharing good stuff yesterday. I’ve never been shy about saying the pursuit of links should be for people first, engines second.

You can do both, actually, as I’ve also purposely created contemt for professors to use at universities, and sought out interviews and attention from the key Internet news venues.

But these are just a few of the many linking related strategies I’ve used over the years that were designed to build recognition of my site, name, brand, and send me a trickle of traffic.

Now, even though Google may be my single biggest source of traffic at about 360,000 pageviews per year, all those links I’ve gotten over the years collectively send me 5.6 million pageviews per year.

Simple analogy: It’s easier to get a million people to give you a dollar than it is to get one person to give you a million dollars.

Still, everyone keeps chasing that million dollar #1 ranking at Google. Big mistake. The less you chase it, the more it is likely to come right to you.  I’m living proof.

But back to “Search Plus Your World”.

Having made my case clear above, I must also state that I do have a Google+ page, and I wouldn’t for a moment suggest you ignore what Google is doing right now.

The key is don’t panic, and plenty of people are, because they have no idea where this will all lead, and exactly how it affects their SEO or link building strategies.

With this in mind here are the simplest linking strategies I’m recommending in response to Google’s launch.

1.  Now would be the worst possible time to abandon the traditional high value static link as a marketing strategy. Why?

Permanence. Social is fleeting. (Hey check this out, wow did you see this, hey read this article.) This is a far cry from a few thousand website curators putting together vetted lists of resources in any given vertical. I’m about to launch a site about hearing impairment, and my linking blueprint for this launch includes over 20 different strategies, with social being just one of them, and GPYW will be in there, but not my core long term ranking tactic.

Without permanent merit based links earned by content quality, no site will rank well.  You cannot social your way to the top, just like you can’t press release your way to the top, or directory your way to the top, or article blast your way to the top.

2.  Simple.

If you don’t yet have a Google+ page, create one, and if your website’s pages don’t have G+ buttons, add them.

It’s free, easy, and you should have already had one anyway. Here’s mine. I didn’t create this profile because I was after any linking related credit. I did it because it’s just silly not to.  It doesn’t change my core ethos and strategies towards linking, it simply augments it and takes advantage of the ever widening presence Google is creating.

3. Learn exactly how Google Plus Your World works, so you can start building your audience on Google+. It isn’t going away, and it isn’t that hard. I’ve barely used it and somehow I’m in over 2,000 other people’s circles? How did that happen?  I’ll take it.

So take the time to learn how Google Plus Your World works, from  avariety of sources, not just Googles’ official announcement about it. For example, here’s a great slide show tutorial from the Washington Post.

4. Most importantly, now is the time to expand your link thinking process beyond the traditional link building tactics that have slowly but surely stopped working with each passing year.

If you’ve read my work, you know I never used directories, article databases, press releases, swaps, paid links, or networks. They are too easily gamed and spammed. And I never dropped in rank with each passing Google update, because my link profile was real. I’m not that smart and I don’t know anything you don’t. I just chose to stick to a merit based path, while others chose something else.

Lastly, while I don’t usually give out my private linking secrets, do you know where I got most of my traffic last week? I wrote a list of link marketing tips for a private email based newsletter in the automotive industry.

That private email newsletter went to 35,000 people, many of whom had websites. That email also had a link to my site in it.

None of this had a thing to do with Google, Google+, Google Plus Your World, or any other search engine or social network. But it was still link building, or more accurately, link marketing. And it was a nice bit of traffic. That’s where you need to be headed in 2012.

There are a thousands ways to get links and traffic that have nothing to do with search. While you pursue your Google+ traffic, why not augment that thinking with ideas and strategies like mine above. The goal isn’t Google, the goal is staying in business.

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 conversions.

Before you build links to all these non-main-site properties though, you need to actually do the same thing you’d do for your site: build up a great presence that’s actually worthy of generating links. Link to these “others” from your main site, and link to your main site from them.

Rank Without Your Site

Does your Facebook page show up in the SERPs when a search for your brand is conducted? If you have one, it probably does, but let’s take that idea and extrapolate it to something a bit more complex. Facebook pages rank well, as we know, so just the act of having one usually means it’s going to show up for your brand. What about for keywords though?

Just so we all remember that there are more great sites than Facebook, let’s take a look at another example. For a search on “Greensboro tree service” I see relevant local results from the following sites listed:

• Yellow Pages
• Google Places
• Google Maps
• Better Business Bureau
• Service Magic (a directory site)

In fact, in the top 10 for this search, if you ignore the local results that show, 3 out of 10 results are from sites that are not actual tree service sites. That equates to 3 out of 10 chances to rank without your site, in other words.

Write Something Somewhere Else (Like I’m Doing Here!)

My agency doesn’t have a work blog because I write for other sites and don’t honestly think that I have all that much to say without repeating myself on my own site. When we started the SEO Chicks blog, several people expressed concern that I was building visibility for something that wasn’t only my own, but then that led to other opportunities.

It led to links, to personal rankings, and to the chance to connect with a wider audience. If you can only have a few listings ranking for your site, why not try and rank other pieces of your work and fill up the SERPs? If you do this properly, you can get great results for your personal brand, your company brand, or your target keywords.

Let’s take the lovely Debra Mastaler as an example here, since she writes for this site and has some great other authority rankings in the top 10 for her name:

In a name search for Debra, you get her sites (new and old), her Twitter profile, author and speaker profiles, and an interview with an industry site. In this case, 6 out of 10 results are from sites that don’t specifically belong to her.

These sites contain links to Debra’s company sites of course, so they’ve been great for link building for traffic most importantly. Debra’s company ranks number 1 for her name, but mine does not, as you can see here:

In fact, most of my business does not come from my actual website (and since it’s an outdated and somewhat crappy site, I’m not complaining.) Most of it comes through referrals from other SEOs, the articles that I write, or interviews that I’ve done.

My site doesn’t rank well for a lot of key terms for my industry but my name pops up as the author of several articles written about link building. Those articles drive quality traffic to me, whether it’s through an author contact form or my actual website.

Brand Yourself Through Non-Site Channels

My cousin has a tire shop that has a website. He also has an awesome Facebook page for it where citizens of my tiny town actually interact. Now, if you are from such a small place, you’ll understand that being wished Happy Holidays by your tire shop employees fosters goodwill and makes you go there when you need new tires. It’s quite simple.

They promote their latest specials, they give out tips about tire pressure, etc, and they give you the info that’s usually annoyingly hard to find on regular websites (store hours, for a prime example.)

Quiksilver has an awesome YouTube brand channel. From road trips to surfing videos, they promote seriously cool content here. As of this time, they have 20,781 subscribers with 11,302,038 video views.

What I like about this is that they use YouTube for things other than selling their clothes. You may see a cool surfing video where the surfer is wearing a suit that you like so since it’s on the Quiksilver brand channel, you’ll go to the site and try to find it. It’s a great way to keep branding.

Figure Out Where Your Users Are & Be There (When They Are There!)

There are a few “when to tweet” services out there but I usually rely on Crowdbooster for this. You have to keep a few things in mind when you’re promoting content of course, with regards to when to do it.

I personally respond very, very well to Papa John’s emails about whatever special happens to be running that day, as they usually hit my inbox at the perfect time (for me with this, that is usually mid-morning when I’m starting to wonder about lunch or around 3pm when I’m struggling to figure out what the kids will eat for dinner.)

If those emails hit my inbox at 10pm, they wouldn’t be effective for me. You can check your site’s metrics to see where your traffic is coming from and make sure that you’re addressing users when they’re likely to be online.

Find out where else your target market hangs out. Competitive analyses can be very good for this so see if your competitors have a Facebook page that’s full of interaction. Are people commenting about your restaurant on Yelp? Then monitor what they say and respond.

Setting up Google alerts, Twitter alerts, and Facebook alerts should cover the majority of what’s said about you online but obviously something like a mention on a private forum that is offlimits to search engines isn’t going to find its way to you. That’s why you might need to do a bit of digging in order to unearth potentially “hidden” communities.

Rank In the Real World, Not Just The Engines

There are plenty of chances for this…conferences, smaller industry events, etc. Do people know your name, do they associate you or your brand with quality, do they reference you when someone asks “who can you recommend to do X for me?”

I live in the South in an old wooden house, so I am quite well acquainted with a local pest control company. If someone mentions seeing a spider the size of his head crawling under the bed, I’ll recommend this company. They’re always on time, the employee who comes out is able to ignore my killer bloodhound, and he’s extremely polite and efficient. Every single time. They rank in my world, so to speak.

A personal recommendation, many times, trumps what you find in the SERPs.

Remember: everyone has a preference for interaction. Some people love Facebook pages, some people can’t live without Twitter, some just want to go to your site. Some people want to read reactions from your customers and a Facebook page is usually perfect for this.

No matter what you do, your actual website isn’t going to be number one all the time. People look elsewhere for what they need so why not be there?

Next up in our tool review series:  Ontolo Internet Marketing Tools

The current Ontolo toolset is owned by partners Ben Wills and Andy Davidoff and has been a work in progress since 2008. The tool is designed to find link prospects based on topic, link types and phrases you provide. It pulls prospects from the search results, analyzes, filters and then places what it finds in a customized database.

Ben Wills explains the process like this:

Here’s an example of how Ontolo works:  If one of your prospecting phrases is “red shoes” and you’re looking for sites/blogs offering guest posts, we might search for “red shoes guest post” (without quotes)  or “red shoes guest author” (without quotes).  When the tool finds sites/blogs offering guest posting, it pulls the top results into your database, crawls each prospect and collects certain data on that link prospect (PageRank, SEOmoz scores, outbound links, etc).

It then filters the data and arranges it in your customized database so when you log in, you can ask the tool to pull the “guest post” opportunities and start reaching out to those webmasters.  There might be 200 opportunities, but with Ontolo, in just a couple of seconds, you’ll find the top sites that will give you the most link value from that guest post.

In a nutshell, Ontolo finds sites you can contact for links. The type of sites depends on how you configure the tool and the keywords you give it. Only want pages showing a certain level of PageRank or with a certain number of out links? No problem, just set Ontolo for what you want and watch the results come in.

I asked Ben where the name “Ontolo” came from, he chuckled and said:

“we sort of made it up, it’s a shortened version of the word ontology or ontological.  An easy way of explaining an ontology is that it looks at one thing and attempts to understand it’s relationship to another thing within a specific context.  It’s a thinking process that’s fundamental to a lot of our own personal thinking, but we also saw it as a great way to look at link, marketing and business relationships.”

Ontolo offers multiple pricing levels and comes with a 14 day free trial. The Competitive Backlink Tool, the Link Monitor and the SERP Dominator tools are free with registration, the rest part of the paid service. Let’s run through the tool and look at a number of the key elements.

Getting Started

The first and most important thing you need to do when using Ontolo is configure the Campaign Manager with your keywords, filters and preferences.

The Campaign Manager is the brains behind the operation, setting it up correctly is vital if you want a list of quality sites to prospect for links.  The better information you put into it, the better the data it returns.

Discover Prospects – Query Generator V2

The Query Generator V2 tool generates a list of link building queries based on Asset, Opportunity or Campaign type. This tool rocks and is the best part of the Ontolo toolset in my opinion.

If you look at the screen shot below, the data listed under “Query” is what the tool returned when I asked it to search on my keywords (memory foam mattress) and listed “content for placement” as my Asset Type.

The list of results are sites the tool found when it searched on my keyword phrase plus various content placement terms such as “submit a blog post” or “become a contributor”.

Webmasters looking for fresh content will often add these phrases to their sites hoping to attract new writers, so I have a good chance of finding a relevant source to host my links.

Keep in mind, the tool does not reach out and contact the site or create your content, but it does eliminate the time-consuming process of prospecting for sources.

TIP:  The sources the Query Generator V2 tool returns are varied but a large number are blogs. Use the blogs you find for additional links by asking to be placed on the blogrolls of the sites you write for.

Review Prospects

All of the information Ontolo finds it sends to your database where it sits until you sift, filter and sort by a number of terms and types.

You can filter the results several ways, the tool uses advanced search operators to find keywords and links within your database. The results are listed in a spreadsheet and available for download or you can work right off the spreadsheet since the links are live.

In the screenshot above, I set filters to return sites using the keyword  ”mattress”  from “Blogroll” results and set filters so the sites would have a PageRank range of 2 – 9 and a certain domain authority.

My goal here was to find active blogrolls to add our blog link to. The results returned were disappointing at best, the Onoto query tool seems to have searched by page segmentation in this case and not category.

Here’s what I mean:

Notice the word “mattress” does appear in sidebar navigation but under categories such as “Recent Post” and “Tags”, not under blogrolls.

In the top 14 results returned, only one was a true blogroll, the rest looked like the screen shots above. This option was not helpful and extremely time consuming to net only one lead. Ditto for results when filters were set to “Donation Links” and “Sponsored Links”.

Where the blogroll, donation and sponsored link options were a bust, filtering for Article Directories was a boon! The tool listed a very long list of article directories and sites with article submission categories. The latter is an important point to note, blogs and websites offering article submission areas are another great content hosting source.

Two things to keep in mind when filtering results: first, filling out the Campaign Manager with all your keyword terms helps return good leads and information to be filtered. Skip keywords and you have less content to pull leads from.

Second, working leads from Donation and Sponsored Links results should be used as a last resort, spending time propecting for these types of links will do little to improve your link popularity.

I do not feel that way about Blogroll links however, since they have potential to drive targeted traffic, pass link popularity and build brand, I feel they are worth the time and effort to secure. I hope Ontolo can find a way to improve the Blogroll filtering option so more true results are returned.

Competitor Backlinks

The Competitor Tool scours the backlinks of sites you are watching and lists their backlinks. When you watch a competitors backlinks, you can cherry pick the best and secure the same or figure out their link marketing plan and find better! (This tool is free with registration)

TIP:  It is no longer enough to get the same links as your competitors, you also need to get their social media signals. Find out who they’re following and tweeting, look at their Facebook and Google+ pages and start following and wooing the people they interact with. Hopefully, you’ll increase your followers and signals by doing so.

Monitor Your Best Links

I’m often asked if I know of a monitoring tool that reports back when a link is changed, removed or breaks. Now I have an answer!

The Ontolo monitoring tool checks your links and sends an email when it finds a broken or change in the link you placed on someone else’s site. This is handy if you are swapping links or have negotiated for placement. (This tool is free with registration)

Closing Comments

Overall I liked the Ontolo tool, the options it offers to search and filter information are some of the best I’ve seen. As I mentioned earlier, I think the Query Generator V2 tool is the Ontolo star, it alone could keep a link builder busy for six months.

However, the best parts of Ontolo also hurt it. I’m an experienced link builder so I “got” Ontolo right away but I have to wonder if someone new to the industry would grasp the concepts and benefits behind the tool without spending valuable time in a learning curve.

The “How To” tutorials are lacking at best and with no video tutorials available, a newbie or less experienced webmaster will spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use the tool to their advantage.

Another side effect of using Ontolo was data overload. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the tool returned so much information I was a little overwhelmed initially.

Once I learned how to use the Campaign Manager and how to filter results using the options provided as well as the rating key, I was able to filter my way to an organized campaign. Again, better tutorials and video guides would help here.

Set goals and budget time to go through your leads every day, don’t let the amount of information Ontolo returns overwhelm you! It can all be filtered and saved in a database until you’re ready to use it.

Prioritze your time by looking at what will give you the greatest link return. Spending time on the information returned for “Donation” and “Sponsored” links will do less for you algorithmically than the leads returned under “Article Directories” and “Blogs”. Be link smart here and you will see the benefits.

Keep in mind while Ontolo provides you with sites to contact, it doesn’t do the actual outreach. Have a link builder in place and working as the data is made available, keep the momentum going. Keep refining your database and use it for promotions other than link building. (Think contests, new product launches, press release distribution, etc).

To close, I recommend signing up for the 14 free trial before purchasing Ontolo, ask for help during the trial through their help desk.

If you decide to buy a subscription, I encourage you to take a lot of time filling out the Campaign Manager, don’t skip a step or leave out keywords for any reason, the more information you put in, the better the data coming out.

And with Ontolo, it will come out!

But 2012 is now staring us in the face, and as long as the ancient Mayan calendar merely resets back to the beginning of another cycle in December 2012, we have a lot to look forward to.

To help all of us in the SEO/link building community keep productive in the next year, I’ve come up with a set of New Year’s resolutions for all of us to follow (besides, if we’re wrong about the Mayans, at least we’ll have something to occupy our minds for a little while!).

My Link-Building Resolutions For 2012

1.  DO create great content, including link/Like/Share bait, to grow links organically.

To attract organic links, we have to provide something worthy of linking to. So get cracking on creating that next sweet infographic, viral video, informative newsletter, or fantastic blog post!

Become not only an expert in your field, but be very public about your expertise, and share your knowledge with the world. Make your stories interesting, informative, and compelling. The world will wait with bated breath for your next great proclamation, and link to it en masse when it arrives.

OK, perhaps that bit is a tad over the top. But seriously, if you share the kind of information people are seeking, even if it’s only in your niche area of expertise, you will earn followers, who will help spread the word. And that’s what it’s all about.

2.  DO use social media to build your community and promote that link bait.

Of course, the popular adage “Build it and they will come” only applies to movies about baseball and cornfields. For the rest of us, creating great content is only half the battle. You then need to alert the world that it exists for them to enjoy.

In 2012, that really means regularly investing time in your business’ social media presence, be it a Facebook Fan page, a Twitter account, or a blog.

3.  DO consider working in social media beyond Facebook & Twitter.

Since you’ve already resolved to regularly invest time in social media outreach, do more than the minimum with the ubiquitous venues of Facebook and Twitter.

Take a look at creating a presence in alternative social spaces, such as Flickr and YouTube for media content, SlideShare for presentations, FourSquare and Gowalla for local brick-and-mortar businesses, and the rising star Pinterest for a visual social share of ideas and interests. And there are countless blogs to consider – just find the best ones relevant to your niche and contribute. But above all, make sure you get links back to your site.

4.  DO consider running an online contest to generate links.

Contests are fun. People love winning. If you hold a contest, you can funnel participation through one of the approved apps in Facebook so you can require Likes to enter. You can also encourage sharing of the contest by giving second entries to those who spread the news by social media or linking.

One tip: DO NOT give away yet another iPad 2 as your prize unless you are Apple or perhaps an IOS developer! Make the contest about your business, your prize about your products or services, and use the contest as an opportunity to build relevant sales leads (or at least collect email addresses of people who are interested in what you make or do).

So many businesses give away iPads in their Likes campaigns, and in the end, all they have is a Facebook Fan page filled with an audience who cares not one whit about their company or its products/services!

What a lame way to build business! Keep in mind that the value of the prize is the cost of building your business, but building your business (and its online presence via links and sharing) is your ultimate goal.

5.  DO NOT rely on bot-powered submissions to junk directories.

There, I said it. If your idea of link building is merely submitting a site’s URL to as many junk directories as you can find, regardless of relevance, then you need to read more of the articles here in Link Week!

6.  DO look for creative ways to serve your niche’s community from your site or at least talk about it on your site.

You bring value to people through your expertise in your area of specialization, be it a service you offer, a product you sell, or information you provide. You are the expert. What? You say you are not an expert, but just a peddler of stuff on the Net? Think again. OK, you may not be the equivalent of Albert Einstein to General Relativity in your chosen field, but think hard.

As you have worked in your field, surely you’ve learned something of interest, such as how to be successful, how to grow your business in good times, how to persevere through hard times, and how to market yourself online.

Sometimes your potential for greatness is not necessarily in the specific one thing you do (maybe that’s a crowded field), but instead in the unique combination of all the things you do and how they are done. You have that expertise. Share it! Go beyond the norm and contribute that knowledge to your community. By doing so, you establish your own authority in your field, and that is where you have value to offer the rest of us.

7.  DO ensure your site’s URL is always listed (canonically) in your profile of online business directory listings.

Go through all of your online business directory listings and local search profiles and find your company’s page. Many times you’ll have a page on a directory site where you didn’t know it existed, and often that data is either incomplete or flat out wrong.

Find those listings (especially the ones with little to no information) and fill them in, being especially careful to use the single, primary (aka canonical) URL for your site. This is easy link building for yourself, and when you make your listings consistent, others will notice (including the search engines!).

8.  DO NOT buy links or Likes if you care about the long-term health of your domain name or business reputation in search.

Just a year ago, JC Penney was busy working the SERPs with its paid link ad campaign. Luckily for them, they are a big retailer with plenty of ad money to spend. After they were outed by the New York Times, they were penalized by Google for their misdeeds, but they paid their penance to society (well, at least to the Google) for a short while and now all is back to normal.

But your little business may not be so lucky. Google may not be so generous on quickly rescinding a penalty on a small business.

Can your business afford to be permanently banned from the Google index? What’s your Plan B when your little foray into the black hat world backfires with index penalties? Can you afford the loss of search referrer revenue for the penalty period? What if Google decides to never forgive you?

Both Google and Bing invest a lot of resources searching for this behavior (not to mention a few vigilante SEOs who love to out cheaters!). Unless domain name trust has no value in your line of business, don’t risk your search revenue stream with bleary-eyed dreams of temporary success.

Invest for the long term with thorough, ongoing SEO campaigns supported simultaneously by PPC ad campaigns, and a good concurrent dose of active community building via social networking. It’s far less risky, and in the long run, a much smarter way to pursue success in search.

9.  DO ask authoritative sites in your niche for links.

You probably already know who the major players are in your industry’s niche (if you don’t, then whom are you competing against?). Of course, if you’re Company A retailing Widget X, you’re not likely to get a link for Widget X from competing retailer Company B. That said, if you run a very successful bed and breakfast, asking your regional B&B trade association for a link may be a good idea. There are countless variations on that idea.

However, before you go and do that, you better first have some great content published worthy of that link! Perhaps you write about running the business end of the B&B trade. Perhaps you are an expert pastry chef. Perhaps you understand the local tourism industry. Perhaps you know all about hospitality accounting. Hey, if you’re reading this, you might be an online marketing expert (the term “expert” being relative to others in your industry).

Whatever it is, develop content for your niche, dedicate yourself to periodically adding new content to your collection, and perform link building for that content collection. Even competitors may find what you have to say interesting enough to link to it. But always remember to ask for the link. They may decline, or they may not. But by not asking, you’ve all but ensured you’ll get the same result as the decline. Give your great content a chance to shine by asking for links! As long as the content is worthy, you’ll start getting them.

We all have a lot of work to do in 2012. Let’s hope the Mayans don’t blow it for us all! I wish you all a warm, peaceful, and prosperously linked New Year.

Stock image from Shutterstock, used under license.

Before I dive into predictions for 2012, let’s take a look back at where I’ve been wrong and right over the years. I have a fairly good track record, and I like to take a few chances with these, rather than taking the easy way out with predictions like “links will still matter”.

Footer Links Get The Boot?

I was quite wrong about search engines devaluing all footer link networks. As easy as these are to spot, it baffles me that some sites can achieve high rankings via this spammy tactic. Check out this amazing expose blog post from Joost de Valk.

Prediction for 2012: This will be the year the footer link truly hits the ignore bucket. This tactic has been around since the early 90s with “free web counters” that sneakily linked to other sites. Then came WordPress themes, then site-wides, blogroll spam, footer links and many other tricks. Key word: tricks.

I am frankly amazed footer links have not been blown up. Like they should have been way back when school newspapers first used them like this below.  Sorry, I’m not telling you the school.

Paid links on a school newspaper web site

Directory Links Take A Dive

I was both right and wrong about general (non vertical) directory links losing all value. While some of the worst directories have finally died a welcome death, I have still witnessed sites improve rankings via submissions to weak no-name directories. It will stop someday, it just didn’t in 2011.

Hopefully, 2012 is the year the generic link directory to nowhere and everywhere stops having any effect at all. How can any algorithm take seriously a directory that nobody uses other than the people submitting links to them?

Sorry, Link-o-Matic is ficticious

The name of the game here is curated verticality. And it’s what I’ve been going after since the day I started in 1994.

Name me one single mass general directory that comes anywhere close to truly organizing and cataloging the Web. None of them can. Yahoo! couldn’t. DMOZ couldn’t. The Web’s very nature is distributed links pointing at expert content. Single source directories are antithetical to the nature of the web’s design.

Prediction for 2012: Watch for hundreds if not thousands of small highly curated and vetted resource lists to appear. In fact, they already do, and have for years.

I’m not going to give away the farm here, but for a recent project I gathered over 80 veterinary resource collections based at .orgs, coms, and .edus. These are small curated lists. And they matter. They matter more that you’d ever imagine.

Notice the link on the bottom right: Veterinary Product Vendor Sites. 

Which of the two directories would you rather be in?  Link-O-Matic above or this one below?

Facebook Brand Pages Build Likes & Links

I was wrong thinking any company with an existing and well trafficked website could forgo having a Facebook page.

While not an absolute necessity for every site, (are enough people really going to become fans of the Preperation H Hemmoroid Treatment Facebook page to matter?) the sheer mass and potential matriculation across the Facebook links space make it a worthwhile alternative mode to reach customers.  At least for most brands it does.

Prediction for 2012:  Dare I say it, every brand not currently on Facebook will be by the end of 2012.

Please Like Us - We Stop Itching!

Twitter Link Cred

I was right about Twitter having a far smaller effect on organic search rank that most claimed it would. Tweeted links have yet prove to me that their rank has improved due to being tweeted. Tweets are good for quick drive by traffic and that’s about it.

The only Twitter impact I see in organic results is people with Twitter credibility will see their twitter profile rank quite high. I was a reluctant Twitter user several years ago, but I can’t argue with the fact that my Twitter profile ranks at position 4 for a search on my name, and I’ve done nothing other than be cautous about who I follow and what I tweet.

My Twitter profile Ranks #4

Prediction for 2012: People will stop chasing followers and work on sculpting a more authoritative Twitter profile. What this means is instead of following 17,000 people and having 17,000 followers, people will realize that to have any influence at all, you need have more followers than you follow, and you need to tweet about things other than how wonderful your most recent column was. Share the good, curate the helpful, and the followers will come.

Anchor Text Gets Devalued

I was right about anchor text being devalued. This was never a reliable signal, because it was too SEO centric a signal and too easily gamed. You’ve heard me say before, in 17+ years of requesting links, I’ve never once asked for anchor text.

The most trustworthy content on the Web is not going to give over editorial rights to you so you can anchor your way up the Google ladder. We are all the Hemingway’s of our own content, so don’t tell me how to link to you.

The engines more than likely did not realize just how far people would go to try and manipulate anchor text, but the ironic thing about this is the more you try to manipulate your anchor text, the more you create a backlink profile that looks suspicious when compared to the mass of historical anchor text data the engines have to study.

Prediction for 2012: Services like these below slowly but surely start to vanish.

Two Final Predictions

First, people will discover the fantastic and free linking data available from blekko. It’s incredible.

Second, people will realize the futility of relying on search engines for all their traffic, and put more effort into link marketing tactics and strategies that have nothing to do with search results, like this.

Don’t laugh, their last client’s QR code baked cookies resulted in a 40% scan and install rate for a mobile app. Forty percent. Via an edible baked cookie with a QR code on the icing.  And yes, it was my idea and it had nothing to do with search engines. Here’s one they baked for me:

Baked Cookie with QR Code

Sometimes us early adopters who have been around a while can see the forest for the trees. Have a great 2012!

For our purposes here in Link Week, I’ll be reviewing the Site Explorer, Backlink History, Neighbourhood Checker, and Clique Hunter.

Basic Tool Functions

First up is the Site Explorer, which takes your URL and returns tons of information: Summary, Top Backlinks, Referring Domains, and Top Pages. Each section is represented on the results page, but you can click on the tabs and get more in-depth info if you like. You can choose the Fresh Index or the Historic Index and run the report on either the domain, the subdomain, or the page itself.

My favorite tool, the Backlink History, also shows up here in the results page but not in its own tab. Now, a note on the Fresh vs. Historic Index: the Fresh index gives you information from a rolling 30 day period and is more, um, fresh, while the Historic index gives you everything in Majestic’s history for a site.

The Domain Information gives you your Referring Domains and External Backlinks, so you can quickly tell if you have a lot of sitewides (if you have 10k backlinks and 10 referring domains, yes, you have a lot of sitewides.)

Your backlinks and referring domains are broken down into educational and governmental and the following information is displayed: Referring IP Addresses, Class C Subnets, Indexed URLs, Images, Nofollow Links, Redirects, Frames, and Deleted Links. You’ll also see a number called the Majestic Million which is a list of the top one million domains as rated by Majestic SEO.

The Backlink History shows your 2 charts: 1 is your external backlinks discovery over the past 12 months and the other is your referring domains discovery over the past 12 months. You can click on these two charts in order to go directly to the Backlink History tool and get more information.

The Top Backlinks area shows the Source URL, Anchor Text, Target URL, and Last Crawl Date.

The Referring Domains area lists the top domains that link to your URL.

The Top Pages area lists your top pages: Title, URL, AC Rank (which is a measure of how important a page is based on the number of unique referring external root domains), Date, External Backlinks, and Referring Domains.

How To Interpret The Link Data

This is a wealth of information for analyzing a backlink profile. If you’re analyzing your own site, I see numerous uses:

• Identifying the top pages that link to you and making sure these links stay up. It’s tricky to watch all your backlinks if you have a lot of them, but if you’re too overwhelmed, just identify the top ones and track those.

• Identifying your site’s top pages so that you can continue to build good links to these in particular (and go through your site to ensure that your top pages link to other pages that you think are critical but aren’t viewed as top ones just yet.)

• Identifying pages of lower importance so that you can work on their content in hopes of generating more backlinks.

For competitive analysis, this information can easily be used to see where you stand compared to others in your niche.

For potential link partners, use this data to identify the top pages on a site and go after a link on that page. With so much information, there are truly countless ways of using this data to help better your link building efforts.

Note: I’d love to include a screenshot here but the information you get takes up a large amount of space and I don’t think I can do it justice. Since you can see the Site Explorer for free, even if you can’t get all the detailed data, I’d suggest checking it out for yourself.

Next up is the Backlink History, which has been something I have relied upon many times (especially when clients are trying to convince me that they know their competitors aren’t matching/beating their own link building efforts.) You can again use either the fresh or historic index here and you can compare up to five domains. Currently, subdomains are ignored.

This tool shows backlink discovery by month, so let’s get a screenshot of a few SEO sites to compare (Disclaimer: I write for the three sites used here):

What you see here is the default view, which is a set of two graphs: backlinks discovery and referring domains discovery in non-cumulative view.

You can view the charts in Monthly, Cumulative, or Normalized forms, see them as a Spline, Line, Column or Area chart, and choose whether you want to see data from 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or all time.

Majestic SEO advises that you use the Normalized view and/or compare domains in order to get the most comparable data down at the bottom of the page. In these charts, you’ll see how you compare to your competitors.

It’s interesting to compare the two charts as well because of the difference in referring domains and backlinks discovery (and for those of you who are new to link building concepts, referring domains would show a value of 1 even if there were 150 links to a site on that same site, but it would show a value of 150 if you were looking at backlinks.)

According to the chart in the screenshot, Search Engine Land has traditionally built more backlinks than the other two but the referring domains numbers between SEL and Search Engine Journal are quite close. (Poor SEO Chicks.) This would make me suspect that Search Engine Land is generating more instances of multiple links on the same domain. In any case, this is a seriously great tool to use to see how your backlinks/referring domains compare with others.

Now we’ll turn to the Neighbourhood Checker, which accepts either a domain or an IP address. As usual, you can choose either fresh or historic data. This tool shows you the most backlinked domains hosted on any IP or subnet so that you can get a better idea of potentially dangerous cohosted sites.

When you enter your site or IP, you get two lists: one that shows what is cohosted on your IP, and one that shows what is cohosted on your subnet. Here’s an edited screenshot, as I don’t want to rile anyone up:

The data shown lets you check the site out by visiting it, going to the Site Explorer, or seeing its Backlink History, so checking out what’s cohosted is pretty simple. You’re shown the location of the IP, referring domains, and external backlinks to each domain listed.

I would recommend using this tool in conjunction with others that give you a fuller picture, of course, since with the rise in spammy sites over the past decade, it’s truly difficult to run a report like this and not find something that might seem a bit dangerous at first glance. There are many ways in which this data could be interpreted, so I’ll leave that up to you.

Last but not least is the Clique Hunter which allows you to enter up to ten unique root domains (with a minimum of two) and shows you a representation of the main sites that link to the sites you’ve entered, therefore identifying your cliques.

The thickness of the line indicates that more links come from that domain to the domain it points to, so as you can see in the screenshot below, there are lots of links on blogspots that point to Search Engine Land.

Further down, you can better filter your results by increasing your minimum number of matches, number of results shown, and the depth of analysis. You can then sort the data by about a dozen metrics, ascending or descending, then sort further (like you’d do with a spreadsheet.)

You’ll see a list of domains along with the number of linked domains to those sites, matches, Alexa rank, and numbers for your queried domains. For each domain listed, you can visit the site, view the backlink history, see it in Site Explorer, or create an exportable CSV report. There are also links at the bottom that will allow you to view the queried domains in summary form on the Bulk Backlink Checker and the Backlink History.

Interestingly, this tool was inspired by Aaron Wall’s Hub Finder (my favorite of his set.) Just as with the Site Explorer, there is a multitude of great information here and I can see tons of ways to use it for link building but the main one is simple:

Identify the sites that link to your competitors but not to you, yet. Pursue links on those sites.

It’s worth mentioning that Majestic has a cool plugin that works in either IE (gasp) or Firefox. It lists Majestic SEO as one of your search engines so you can simply choose it and go to the Site Explorer page for a site.

Link Tool Takeaways

So there you have it…another amazing suite of tools that can ramp up your link building efforts, complete with a blog, video tutorials, and a constantly updated index.

Overall, Majestic is extremely easy to use and is quite intuitive, so even for a true beginner, I can’t see these tools being overwhelming. The amount of data could potentially overwhelm someone but honestly, that’s not a bad thing in my opinion. I’d rather have more than less. With the different packages available, even a small or solo operation would be well-advised to use this system.

Majestic also has a great blog that is searchable and contains posts about latest updates, along with tons of training posts and videos. If you can’t figure out how to use one of their tools, it’s not for their lack of trying. I actually found it all quite straightforward and intuitive though, and even for a novice tool user, I don’t think you’ll be stumped.

Finally, there is the API: I did not test this but it’s worth noting as it enables you to access key functions and gives you a development area where you can test applications without affecting your subscription resources (which include set numbers of reports you can run a month, for example.)

While we’re on the subject of reports, there are two types: standard and advanced. All subscription plans provide access to standard reports, which can be run for any website. A standard report gives you what Majestic believes is the key set of information including an overview, backlinks information, and anchor text information. Advanced reports gives you absolutely everything you could possibly want to know about a domain. These reports are also downloadable so that you can further analyze the data.

To sum it up, this is a massively powerful set of tools if you’re interested in link building. It’s intuitive, fast, and due to the different tiers of pricing, there’s an option for everyone. If you need less link-focused tools this may not be the suite for you, because there are no rank checkers or code validators, but for link building, it’s seriously top notch.

Yes, you heard right. The holidays are a great time to launch link bait campaigns, because you can piggy-back on the popularity of the holiday and of peoples’ enthusiasm for it. That doesn’t just apply to Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/etc. but also key holidays throughout the year, such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Independence Day, and Halloween. In general, seasonal link baiting makes a lot of sense.

Now let me chronicle for you one of my absolute favorite holiday-themed link bait campaigns, the The Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar from the coaching directory Noomii.com. (Disclosure: Noomii is a client of mine.)

This last minute linkbait campaign idea evolved out of several link bait brainstorming sessions we had. The advent calendar idea itself was hatched on November 30. Now, that’s about as last minute as you can get — Advent started the following day! Talk about JIT (“Just In Time”). Everyone at Noomii sprung into action, even a couple of folks did an all-nighter (OMG those are absolutely awful!) to make the launch date of December 1st.

The idea behind the campaign was simple: unlike most advent calendars which give you a small gift each day leading up to Christmas (such as a toy or candy), this one asks you to perform a daily act of kindness for someone else. The daily acts are quirky and light, and include such tasks as “Be a Secret Santa”, “Give out Five Complements”, and even an indulgent Sunday task entitled “Be Kind to Yourself”.

Noomii did a lot of things right with this campaign in a limited amount of time. For one, the site was built with off-the-shelf tools (WordPress and various free plugins), which means the creators didn’t need to spend a lot of time or money getting it up and running.

The concept is simple and easy to “get” right away. Someone stumbling upon the site will instantly understand the what it’s all about without the need to read the “About” section (the button for which, incidentally, is cleverly labeled “WTF?”, for “What the Fruitcake?”).

The user interface is clean and simple: the home page consists of 25 clickable links superimposed on an image of a typical Christmas scene (that is, if you consider penguins putting up Christmas lights “typical”).

Viral and social elements include the standard social sharing links, a simple email subscription feature, and community forums for sharing stories of daily acts of kindness with other users.

A subtle but clever viral element is the fact that most of the acts of kindness require the user to do something for someone else – often several people. No doubt the creators are hoping the unsuspecting recipients of these acts will do good onto the world and inquire about their origins.

If there had been more time, Noomii would have done an iPhone/iPad/Android app and/or Facebook app. Ah well, next year!

Here are some other notable link bait campaigns I’ve come across this holiday season:

• Should you buy that gift? A flowchart for all your holiday shopping
• Your Guide to Holiday Treats, an infographic from Mrs Fields
• Interflora’s Top 10 Christmas gifts for 2011
• 12 Christmas Decorations for Geeks
• Snowflake Workshop
• 11 Crazy Christmas Trees

So what are your favorite holiday-themed link bait campaigns? Talk back in the comments!