Link building has eternally been the element of search engine optimisation where SEO companies have kept their cards close to their chest. With more and more people now understanding the on page changes that need to be implemented to put a site in a good strong position in the eyes of the search engines it has now fallen to effective link building to become the difference in many cases between success and failure for many projects.

Due to this fact SEO experts have always been very cagey about giving out their secrets on creating lists of potential sites to target for a link building campaign. There have been a limited number of blogs previously on this subject but I would like to add to this some tools that are available that are excellent resources to create link building target lists and are available to everyone.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO profess themselves to be the net’s most comprehensive backlink research provider and considering the fact that they have managed so far to scour over 1.5 trillion unique URLs it is difficult to argue this point. For a fairly low fee Majestic offer the ability to export a list of links they have found for your own site or indeed any other site you wish to look at. You can then sort these links by Majestic’s own ranking parameter “AC Rank” which whilst it isn’t an accurate reflection of PageRank does at least provide some way of removing all the irrelevant links and provide easier access to the most interesting links.

SEOMoz

SEO Moz are one of the most recognised names to many SEO experts due to their well read blogs which are generally extremely informative. Whilst they do advertise the other services they offer on their site and I often feel that many don’t fully understand what can done with them and how useful they can be. They offer various packages ranging from $79 – $229 per month which give you access to their additional tools. The most useful of which for the purposes of this blog is their Linkscape tool. SEO Moz do not have as big a cache of the internet as Majestic with 43 billion unique URLs but the reports on offer are extremely valuable as a source for link building research. Linkscape offers not only a similar style report to the one from Majestic but also a second option that will report back anchor texts for sites too showing what percentage that anchor text takes up of the total links they have.

Both of these tools are known to many but I have noticed they are under used resources. Through the reports that they create you can pull together a huge resource of potential link partners with which you can liaise with to determine a potential agreement that could be beneficial to both partners. In the majority of cases this should also turn back a high volume of relevant sites too which not only will benefit your linking profile but also have the potential to add value to the end user too which is always the ultimate goal.

Whilst this is not the only way to go about quality link building to your website it is certainly an under used option that can help you towards your search engine optimisation nirvana.

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