There are plenty of good SEO tools out there, both free and paid, that will help you analyze on-page and off-page optimization. One of the most important factors of modern day optimization is link building and finding one-way links from relevant, authoritative websites.

So what is the best way to find sites that are relevant to your site and will more importantly help increase your search engine rankings?

Trackur, a tool developed by Andy Beal (of Marketing Pilgrim), is primarily used to monitor and manage your brand online. It has been mentioned as Google Alerts on steroids. You enter a keyword or brand name and the tool will scour the web for websites, blogs, forums, discussion boards, videos, images, and social media sites for any mention of the keyword you are looking for. It will display up-to-date results that are easy to browse and sort. You can also filter words that you do not want to show up, save searches, export results, bookmark items, email alerts, etc… The tool was mainly meant to quickly identify any mentions of your brand, products, services, or keywords across the web.

However, I have found this brand management tool to be a great way to find sites to get links from. Just by entering keywords you are looking to rank for or are related to your industry, you can identify hundreds of sites that could potentially be quality one-way links or link partners. The great thing about Trackur is it allows you to sort by many different criteria. My favorite is sorting by “Influence”. Influence is Trackur’s Pagerank, it will sort the results by which sites have the most influence in terms of search engines. This will allow you to quickly find quality websites that search engines find important. I recommend that you draft up a link building request template that you can use to email webmaster and request a link. In your email, make sure to say specifically why you like their site and how their visitors could benefit from your site.

Trackur is reasonably priced considered it capabilities and value. They offer three different price tiers and a custom tier for agencies.

They also offer a FREE TRIAL so you can try it before you buy.

More from StayOnSearch

• Your Website SEO Checkup: Part 5 of 8 – Link Building
• Your Website SEO Checkup: Part 2 of 8 – Keyword Research
• Open Site Explorer: SEOmoz Launches a Comprehensive Link Analysis Tool
• Why Are Infographics Such Great Link Bait?

StayOnSearch Recommends

• Using Google AdWords Keyword Tool (The Arkayne Blog)
• Building Link Popularity The Techniques (seowizardry)
• List Building – Landing Pages (Brandon Hann)