Authoritative inbound links increase the authority of your site and boost your search engine rankings. Great content will earn you some organic links, but most website owners also use link-building strategies to find additional link sources.
In Link Building with OSE and a Host of Other Tools, Rand Fishkin presents a free webinar in which he talks about using a variety of free and low-cost tools to find worthwhile link sources.
Not surprisingly, SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) is one of Rand’s favorites. In this webinar, he discusses how it can help you with the competitive analysis you need to do in order to find link sources.
When you enter your competitor’s URL into OSE, it will return a list of links to the site. You can filter the links however you like. Rand prefers:
• Followed+301
• Only external
• Pages on this root domain
• Group by domain
You can then explore the link profiles of the linking domains to determine if they may be a good target for you. As a tip, you may not want to pursue a site with many inbound links from just a few domains. There are exceptions, but take a closer look before going after it. You can also sort the links by Domain Authority.
A few other link-building tools covered by Rand include:
• Directories and link resources: Make sure you find high-quality ones and avoid the spammy ones.
• Link acquisition assistant: This tool is only available to SEOmoz PRO members, but it finds lists of link acquisition sources based on data that you input about your business.
• Blogscape: Another PRO tool, Blogscape finds all the recent sources of links and mentions pointing at the domain you specify.
Rand offers much more information in the webinar, including resources like FollowerWonk, MoreOfIt, LinkedIn and many more. This free webinar is well worth the time spent watching it.
Information in this post gathered in association with a New York injury attorney,
