7/12/2011
How to Use Link Builder from Wordtracker
(Guest post by Justin Deaville, CEO of Wordtracker)
Effective Link Building, Streamlined
The more good quality inbound links your site has, the more likely it is to rank well for relevant keywords. Yet, getting backlinks from other sites – link building – can be dull, frustrating and downright difficult. Justin Deaville, CEO at Wordtracker.com, explains how a new update to its Link Builder tool can help make link building easier than ever before.
For website owners and SEO professionals, generating quality links from a diverse range of websites has been one of the most difficult tasks in search engine optimization (SEO). A good link builder must have a good analytical brain, bags of creativity – and patience to burn.
That’s why Wordtracker has updated its Link Builder tool to make link building faster and easier. A new version of the tool, released this week, is designed to help you find your best link prospects—and craft linking campaigns that are tailored to your prospects.
You can try Link Builder for yourself, but before you do, it’s worth running through some of the tools neat new features:
Link Builder gives you thousands of valuable potential link prospects in just seconds
To start, all you have to do is enter a keyword. So if you were marketing an online wine store, you might type ‘wine’.
Link Builder starts building your campaign—and within seconds, you’ll see thousands of link prospects.
Link Builder displays your best prospects first
Finding link prospects is easy – just run a search on Google. Finding high quality prospects that are likely to link to you is much more difficult.
That’s why Link Builder automatically sorts your results, bringing the best sites to the fore. Here, you can see a list of relevant directories (note that none of them are yet linking to my site, so there are potential easy wins – I could get my first links today).
Link Builder helps you target different niches
Any marketer will tell you that to achieve the best results you should speak to people in a language they understand. As a link builder, you would never send the same information to a journalist that you would add to a directory. Journalists are interested in well-told, exciting stories; they wouldn’t want to read a factual directory entry.
Link Builder automatically creates strategies that help you separately target each of the niches in your audience. As a result, you are likely to get a better response from your link requests.
For example, if your competitors are winning lots of links from social media, you could get similar results by targeting social media, too.
Link Builder shows you your “quick wins”
Some prospects are more likely to link to you than others. Link Builder tells you who they are. You’ll see:
- Co-linking sites that link to lots of resources in your industry – it should be easy to get links from these ‘promiscuous’ sites
- Blogs – good bloggers post frequently and include links to external resources
- New and media – usually provide high-quality links
- Shopping sites often drive direct business to your site
- Trusted sites - a link from a .gov or a .edu site are amongst the best links you can get
In the screen shot (above) you can see social media sites in the wine industry. Note how the sites that link most (a high co-link count) come to the top, so that you don’t need to search for the best prospects
Link Builder sends you new prospects every week
New links appear every day – both to your site and your competitors’. Until now, tracking those new links has been difficult; it’s been only too easy to miss a linking opportunity.
Now, Link Builder helps you find the new links in your industry. We’re continuously monitoring for opportunities and we’ll send you email notifications once we’ve found them. Then, we automatically save the prospects straight into your existing campaigns. This feature alone saves you a heap of time and justifies the cost of the subscription.
Link Builder shows you your competitors’ linking strategies
Link Builder shows your competitors’ linking profiles, so you can see where their best links come from.
In the example below you can see that WineLibrary.com gets many more links from bloggers than its competitor, WineEnthusiast.com. Reaching out to more bloggers might help WineEnthusiast.com to get more links and boost its search engine rankings.
You need never miss a great link opportunity again
Link Builder comes with its own Firefox extension. The extension saves links from any webpage into one of your existing campaigns.
Let’s say you find a list of blogs that make ideal linking targets. Without Link Builder, you’d probably have to copy and paste the prospects, one at a time, into a spreadsheet. But now you can save the whole list with just a couple of clicks. Easy!
Below, you can see that I’m copying a list of fine wine blogs from Technorati.com:
Link Builder helps you show off your successes
We’ve run through some of Link Builder’s coolest features, but it’s worth mentioning that you can also:
- View historic reports for any website that show how the site’s inbound links have grown over time.
- Track your targets – so you’ll know once they’ve added a link to your site
- Highlight and tag your top targets and
- Make notes about your conversations
And, if you’re working in a web design or SEO agency, you can send weekly emails to your clients showing how many new links you’ve generated.
As an example, the graph below shows that in the past month WineLibrary.com has received more links each week than WineEnthusiast.com. Imagine how pleased your boss would be if you were WineLibrary.com’s in-house link builder!
Get Serious About Your Link Building
If you’re ready to move your link building into another gear you can register for a 7-day free trial of Link Builder.
And you can find lots more free advice about link building in the Wordtracker Academy. We run regular link building webinars, as well publishing videos, slide shows and articles. Enjoy!
Justin Deaville has been chief executive officer (CEO) at Wordtracker since January 2011.
He joined the company in 2009 and has helped to publish several of our recent e-books on topics such as link building, PPC and keyword research.
He’s also helped to produce and promote Wordtracker’s search marketing tools, writes regularly for Wordtracker’s blog and posts in our Marketing Academy.
Before joining Wordtracker Justin had a successful career as an actor. His full profile is on LinkedIn, and you can follow Justin on Twitter.
One Response to How to Use Link Builder from Wordtracker
I have been a linkbuilder user for some time, but I have always had a major problem with it… I can’t figure out how to just view my own inbound links for my site… I think you used to be able to do it, but you can’t anymore. You can only see prospects, and if you happen to share a link with a competitor. Otherwise, nothing. I really wish I could see it…