It may be a sweeping statement but if certain tools disappeared it would be devastated – in fact I would probably cry…(a lot!). In this article I thought I might cover some of the tools that I use when working on a clients site. Some you will no doubt be familiar with, some you will know of but may never have tried – some you may not know at all.
In no way do I claim this to be a definitive list – just a quick run down of some of the tools that I have found helpful in the past few years.
Open Site Explorer
For me this is one of the daddies of my SEO toolbox. Literally the day before I wrote this post there was a massive update that coincided with mozcon and one that was very very welcome – check out the ability to get CSV reports of super specific linking details!
What it does: Essentially the good old folks describe it as a search engine for links. No matter whether you are looking for the links that are currently pointing at a clients site or whether you are looking to gain some ‘valuable insight’ on your competitors strategy Open Site Explorer is worth its weight in gold.
Backlinks.In
This cool little tool uses the SEOMoz API to get you the MozRank and the total number of backlinks for any given number of URLs. If you need some basic info quickly this is a monster of a tool and one that I have used a lot recently. You get to call up a 1000 lookups a day which I find is perfect for the sort of rough and ready info that this tool provides:
Multi-Links
This is a great little add-on for Firefiox that allows you too drag across a number of link on any give page and then save them to your clipboard. You can then take these little fellas and pop them into a csv for the next step of the research process. In fact I use multi-links to get the links that I need to populate the Backlinks tool that I talked about above…
In fact the Multi Links tool is a great way to grab the URLs to put into this little excel, rough and ready tool from Business Hut – that isn’t an insult by the way!
The Business Hut Excel/SEOMoz Mash Up
This handy excel tool grabs the important SEOmoz data for any number of URLs – I find it handy to look at the sites that feature above a clients when they are some way down the pecking order when it comes to rankings.
I know the image is a little small, but it was the only way I could fit it in! You will have to trust me on this one that it is worth go and downloading. It allows you to make informed decisions on how you may need to proceed when working your way up the rankings.
I know we all have out favorite tools for SEO and these are just a few of the tools that I use for link building so honorable mentions go out to:
Link Finder, Link Suggest, Xenu Link Sleuth, Bad Neighborhood Tool, Solo, Whitespark, LocalSearchToolkit, EightFoldLogic, Majestic, Ontolo and many many others!!!
