SEO Tool Chest - Link Tools 1

"I love it when Martin opens his SEO tool chest!" That's what one of the people said at a recent chat session at the Workshop Resource Center, while we were analyzing a site. It seems that I keep finding these "Cool Tools" to help with a variety of SEO tasks, so I thought I would start a series of posts featuring various tools. Thus, the SEO Tool Chest is born! ;-)

Since I have become a favorite destination for some visitors who use my Free Directory Listings reviews to help build their site's link popularity, I have been really looking at linking a lot lately. Now I have to say that link building is not one of my favorite things to do. I would much rather try to create quality content and let nature take it's course. While creating quality content is probably still the most important single ingredient in a website, it will not work on it's own. You have to have links for people and the search engines to find you. That brings us to learning how to analyze a multitude of linking factors.

SeoElite is probably the single best link analysis tool in my tool chest. It will provide you with almost everything you want to know about links to a site. It does quite a bit more than just that, but for the focus of this post that is more than enough to gain it a featured spot in my SEO Tool Chest.

But what if you do not want to spend the money, are you out of luck? No, we have several tools that will help with your linking.

MarketLeap's Link Popularity Check is one of the most popular. This tool allows you to check your "link popularity" across multiple engines in a single, simple interface. But don't let the simple part keep you from some great additional features.

You can compare the URL you are checking to three other sites/pages. You can compare your site with that of your competitors. You can also check to see if your inbound back links (IBL) are consolidated by checking www.domain.com vs. domain.com. They have recently added a "Trend/History Report" feature that shows your link pop over time (requires that you run a report more than once). Look around and you will see a few other cool features.

Once you know your raw or gross link popularity score, there is still much to learn. Link Harvester is an incredibly powerful tool that will let you see where all the links come from in convenient groups and show common Class C IP Address blocks. Link Harvester also links to the Internet Archives, WhoIs Source, and Google cache near each link to provide you with even more details. You can export your data in a CSV file and import it into Excel for additional analysis.

This tool uses data from Yahoo! which is usually the most complete source on IBLs. Since the tool is free and uses a Yahoo! API, if you are a heavy user you can get your own API key and host the tool on your own site (I'm going to look into doing that soon).

Updated: I have added a mirror copy of the LinkHarvester tool here: SEO Tool Chest - LinkHarvester. I had to move to a DOM XML enabled server to host this tool, fortunately my great host, Lunarpages had one and moved my site for free! Thanks to SEOBook for this great open source tool.

That's enough for this post, but I have many more cool tools in my SEO Tool Chest, so I will post them here regularly and provide additional information in the SEO Tool Chest section (under development - a continual work in progress).

I want to thank Robin Nobles for making me realize that people are interested in "Cool Tools". I just assumed that everybody was using these great cool tools (Duh!).

As always, please comment below or click on my name to email me.

martin