Two Simple Productivity Tools Help Speed Link Building Process

With the wide variety of tools, tactics, techniques and strategies in use today by link builders, sometimes the best advice involves the simplest of things.

I’m probably the most guilty contributor here at Link Week when it comes to big picture philosophizing, so this week rather than writing another strategy column, I thought I’d bring it back to the execution level, and share a few very simple tricks and tools I use that make the actual link seeking process a little easier.

I don’t mean SEO related tools like NoDoFollow, SearchStatus, Rank Checkers, etc., of which there are countless numbers and varieties.  To be honest, I don’t use those. Never have.

I’m talking about little things that make the life of a link builder easier in other ways. Here’s a couple of my favorites. FYI, I use Firefox as my primary browser when performing link building work.

Send Tab URLs

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4437/

The process of vetting target sites is arduous, mainly due to the signal/noise ratio. We have to look at a lot of ugly ducks before we find that prince of a link target. I often find myself in the middle of an ADD fueled target site research marathon where after five hours of opening and closing hundreds of windows and tabs, I’ve finally culled and narrowed down to a point where I have 37 great target sites identified. The problem is each of those 37 targets is open in its own tab, and now I need to put them somewhere else.

Send Tab URLs is a nifty free Firefox add-on that creates a list every URL from every browser tab in the current Firefox window, and then lets you paste it as a list into another document, or email it.

I use it to email target site lists to myself and share those lists with clients. Extra credit: Email the URLs to yourself and put the project name in your subject line. This makes organizing your email project folders easier.

Copy Fixer

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/230354/

The name is misleading. Copy Fixer has nothing to do with fixing copy. What it does is allow you to copy both the URL and the Title tag element at the same time, without having to move your mouse anywhere. Whatever web page or tab you have open, just hit Ctrl-C, and the page title and URL are coupled together on your clipboard. Then, when you hit Ctrl-V, instead of just getting this:

https://www.torranceca.gov/Library/5610.htm

You’ll get this…

City of Torrance – Consumer Resources
https://www.torranceca.gov/Library/5610.htm

It may seem minor, but this is a game changer when it comes to quickly remembering what a page was about when the URL doesn’t provide many visual clues, like the one above. Copy Fixer is also available for Chrome.

Both the above add-ons are free, and I can’t begin to count the hours they save me. They make me more productive. Take a moment to try them, and you might just wonder how you ever got along without them.