Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) falls into two basic categories.

1. Onsite SEO – These are changes that need to be made to a website, either  to the code, the text or the images.

2. Link Building – This is the generation of inbound links to a website

Both tasks involve a lot of thought. Both tasks require access to great tools. But when it comes to link building, it’s the tools that can often be the difference that makes the difference.

Here’s a problem: there are more ‘link building tools’ out there than you can shake a stick at.  In order to find the best ones to use, you need to work out what you want them to do. There are the range of tasks they can carry out.

Link tools can tell you:

*how many inbound links you have;

*the pages on your website they link to;

*where those links come from;

*the type of links they are;

*any anchor text used in those links

*the ‘strength’ of those links – how much ‘juice’ they are passing to you

Link tools can help you research:

*pages that include your brand name but don’t link to you – low hanging fruit when it comes to link building

*Powerful pages that you should target for link acquisition

*Pages that include the right context for link acquisition

*links used by your competitors that you may wish to target

Link tools can help you:

*record your link building activity

*monitor your links and check their strength and continued existence

*report the effects of link building program to stake holders

So as a company that does great link building, what tools do we use? Here are a few of my favourites:

Basics

http://wholinkstome.com/

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysite

http://www.analyzebacklinks.com/

Advanced

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/">Advanced

http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape

http://www.majesticseo.com/

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

My Choice

Without a doubt, my favourite link building tool is http://raven-seo-tools.com/. This does the lot. It analysis, reports, researches, monitors, and can also pull in data from your Google Analytics too.

What do you think?

Have I missed any great link building tools? Leave us a comment below.