Interactive Marketing Blog

Building one way links from quality websites relevant to your industry is the most effective way to improve rankings for search engine optimization. You may be thinking “that’s great, but where do I find these powerful one way link opportunities?” The first step to starting your link building campaign is with industry leading tools that can provide you with those quality link opportunities.

Top Link Building Tools

1. Open Site Explorer (OSE) – To use open site explorer you will need an SEOmoz account. OSE uses factors like PA – page authority and DA – domain authority to help measure inbound links to a particular website. This is helpful in seeing who is linking to you and who is linking to your competitors. OSE will pull up to 10,000 of the top links to each site. I recommend downloading a CSV file and filtering out all the duplicates, press release sites and article sites. OSE is the new kid on the block but has quickly taken the lead in my opinion.
   
2. Majestic SEO – Majestic is great resource for not only pulling back data but for charting and comparing your overall link profile with competitors in your industry. Take some time to test out features like bulk URL link data and neighborhood checker to see who is in the same IP range. Are you in the “trailer park” of the internet or the “Beverly Hills” of the web? Majestic could be a little more user friendly in my opinion but has a great deal of link data you can access for free. Upgrading your Majestic SEO account will give you access to additional data if you want to take a deep dive into competitors.
3. Raven – Raven is best suited for overall SEO campaign management but has some great tools specifically for link building such as the link manager. In my limited testing of Raven, I found it very helpful in managing contacts and directory submissions. Raven also has a handy toolbar for Firefox to quickly identify link opportunities. Raven also provides link monitoring which is very helpful in tracking changes made on other sites automatically.
   
4. Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) – If you don’t have an SEOmoz account, this is a free back link tool. YSE is limited to only the top 1,000 links so you will not get a complete picture of your link profile or your competitors. There is some debate on the future of YSE.
5. SEO Book Toolbar for FireFox – This is a must have for anyone conducting a link building campaign.
   
6. HubSpot Link Grader – HubSpot has an excellent link research tool. This tool organizes the link data by most recent linking domains which is very helpful in finding new link clean up opportunities. HubSpot can also identify issues on each content page created with a new page grader tool.
   
7. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) – Using this free tool will help you find broken links to your site (404 errors) which you can easily fix by reaching out to each website, asking them to update their link. GWT also provides you with the total number of links to each page which can be helpful in finding links to specific areas of your site.
8. Alltop – Alltop is not a tool necessarily but a resource for finding quality blogs and niche websites. Click on each topic to find good websites in your niche. From there you can branch out from those sites to see who is linking to them.
9. SEO Open Toolbar for Firefox – Simple toolbar for Firefox with quick links to important link data.
   
10. Web Analytic Referring Sites – Tools like Google Analytics can help you find sites currently referring traffic. You can then reach out to these sites to improve the page URL or anchor text they use to link to you.
    

If you are a Cleveland Cavaliers fan you are probably aware LeBron James is requesting his number change in the 2010-2011 season from #23 to #6. This will likely cause fans to shell out some cash if they want fresh threads of their star player. What does this have to do with online marketing you might ask? When a company decides to change their domain name they are essentially changing their jersey number, or brand on the web.

Most companies think the logo at the top of each web page is what people and search engines see as their company brand. For people this is partly true, we recognize the brand of a company once we visit a website and see the logo at the top. If a visitor is entering a website from search engine results, the first brand they see is the company domain name and web page title.

Changing Your Domain Name?

When changing your domain name, there are a few things to consider:

1. Do you have a strong brand name with a very old domain that has been live for many years? If so, you may not want to change your domain name. In the eyes of search engines this is almost like starting over, even if you redirect your old domain to the new one.
   
2. Does your domain name contain keywords relevant to your search engine optimization efforts? If so, consider keeping, if not consider buying a domain that includes your brand plus a keyword or two.
3. How easy is your domain name to remember or tell your potential clients? Choose a domain name that is easy to remember.
4. Try to get a .COM domain since they tend to have higher value to search engines. Careful with .NET and .INFO domains since still have a negative weight in the eyes of search engines.
   

Brand Confusion

What do you do when you have multiple brand named domains with different objectives?

“Time Warner” is a typical search when you are looking to find the Time Warner Cable. In this case the corporate site comes up as the #1 and #2 result, with the cable division ranking #3.



Time Warner has millions of cable and internet service subscribers who access their TimeWarnerCable.com website searching for account information. For many searchers this is a very confusing search engine user experience. I first went to the main TimeWarner.com looking for access to my account only to go back to the results page to find the correct site. A better search user experience would be to land potential traffic on a decision page with the cable site as an option. The ultimate search experience would be to channel TimeWarner.com link authority to the cable site with the goal of outranking the corporate website long term.

What would your SEO domain solution be for Time Warner?

How would you position this brand on the web for a better user experience?