Tools to Make Your Link Building Life Better

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We all know that high-quality inbound links are an essential ingredient in an SEO campaign.  We also all know that it can be extremely time consuming, and sometimes frustrating, looking around the web for sites to approach for links.  I’m going to show you one technique for quickly putting together a list of sites that could be link prospects, without having to scour the internet for hours on end.

What is This All About?

Here’s what this post will show you how to do:  quickly create a spreadsheet of 100 (at a time) sites that may be good link prospects.  In addition to having all of the URLs in one place, the spreadsheet will also have a lot of great SEOmoz data for each URL, like Domain Authority, mozRank, etc.  Sounds good, huh?  Here we go…

Tools

First, you’ll need to get a few tools:

• Google Chrome with the free ‘Scraper’ extension installed.
• The Business Hut SEOmoz API spreadsheet that you can get here:  http://www.businesshut.com/seo/using-seomoz-free-api-excel/.
• An SEOmoz membership so that you can generate an API key.

Using Google to Your Advantage

The first step is to use search operators to quickly get Google’s search results to give you a useful list of sites.  You’ll want to have the Business Hut spreadsheet open, since you’re going to be pasting the results into it.

To get the most results, you’ll want to go into Chrome’s ‘Search Settings’ (the little gear in the top right corner) and set it to return 100 results per page, rather than 10.  To allow this setting to be changed, you’ll need to disable the instant search function.

Now, you’ll use search operators to get a list of useful sites.  In my example, which is just one of many ways you could generate useful results, I’m going to do a search for potential guest blogging opportunities on music-related blogs.  To do this, you’d do a search for something like this:

inurl:”write for us” music

This search will return a list of sites about music (for the most part) that have a page on the site that specifically invites guest writers to write for the site.  Probably a good sign that they’d be open to a guest post!

Time to Scrape

Now, you’ll need to scrape the results so you that can get the URLs into Excel.  To do this, just place your cursor over the title tag of the first result.  Then, right click and choose ‘scrape similar,’ which is an option in your right click menu once you have the Scraper extension installed.  In the scraper tool window that will open, click the ‘Export to Google Docs’ button.  The tool will open Google Docs and place the title tag and the URLs of the first page of the search results (100 results) into the first two columns.  Copy the entire column of URLs and paste them into the first column of the Business Hut spreadsheet.

Importing the Data

The next step is to use the SEOmoz API to generate data for each URL.  Luckily, the spreadsheet you downloaded from Business Hut is all set up do this.  You just need to go to the SEOmoz API page and generate your API credentials if you don’t have them.  Go to sheet 2 of the spreadsheet, enter your credentials, and then go back to sheet one and follow the directions (Alt + F8) to run the spreadsheet macros that will pull in data from the API.

One tip on this part of the process:  if you just generated your API credentials, wait about 10 minutes before running the spreadsheet or you’ll get a lot of blank rows in your data.

Your Colorful New Spreadsheet

After running the spreadsheet, it will populate with SEOmoz data.  Eventually, you’ll have a list of 100 or so URLs, plus all kinds of great metrics for each one.  Having all of these URLs in one spreadsheet alone is tremendously helpful, and having all of the data about each one is even better.  Remember, you can sort by any of the columns if you want to order the URLs by any metric in particular.

Of course, this technique doesn’t replace communicating with site owners and developing relationships.  But, it does give you a great place to start.  I hope you have fun using this technique to build links!  Feel free to comment if you have any questions.