{"id":4435,"date":"2012-01-27T02:45:10","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T08:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/?p=4435"},"modified":"2012-01-27T07:39:37","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T13:39:37","slug":"tools-link-building-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/2012\/01\/27\/tools-link-building-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Tools to Make Your Link Building Life Better"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We all know that high-quality inbound links are an essential ingredient in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/2010\/08\/04\/what-is-seo\/\">SEO campaign<\/a>.\u00a0 We also all know that it can be extremely time consuming, and sometimes frustrating, looking around the web for sites to approach for links.\u00a0 I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<h2>What is This All About?<\/h2>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what this post will show you how to do:\u00a0 quickly create a spreadsheet of 100 (at a time) sites that may be good link prospects.\u00a0 In addition to having all of the URLs in one place, the spreadsheet will also have a lot of great <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/SEOMoz\" target=\"_blank\">SEOmoz<\/a> data for each URL, like Domain Authority, mozRank, etc.\u00a0 Sounds good, huh?\u00a0 Here we go&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Tools<\/h3>\n<p>First, you&#8217;ll need to get a few tools:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/chrome?brand=GGRF&amp;utm_campaign=ww&amp;utm_source=ww-cws-tile&amp;utm_medium=et&amp;hl=en-US\" target=\"_blank\">Google Chrome<\/a> with the <a href=\"https:\/\/chrome.google.com\/webstore\/detail\/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd\" target=\"_blank\">free &#8216;Scraper&#8217; extension<\/a> installed.<\/li>\n<li>The Business Hut SEOmoz API spreadsheet that you can get here:\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businesshut.com\/seo\/using-seomoz-free-api-excel\/\">http:\/\/www.businesshut.com\/seo\/using-seomoz-free-api-excel\/<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>An SEOmoz membership so that you can generate an API key.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Using Google to Your Advantage<\/h3>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The first step is to use search operators to quickly get Google&#8217;s search results to give you a useful list of sites.\u00a0 You&#8217;ll want to have the Business Hut spreadsheet open, since you&#8217;re going to be pasting the results into it.<\/p>\n<p>To get the most results, you&#8217;ll want to go into Chrome&#8217;s &#8216;Search Settings&#8217; (the little gear in the top right corner) and set it to return 100 results per page, rather than 10.\u00a0 To allow this setting to be changed, you&#8217;ll need to disable the instant search function.<a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/100-Results-Per-Page.png\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; margin: 10px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;\" title=\"Chrome's 'Search Settings' \" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/100-Results-Per-Page_thumb.png?resize=445%2C170\" alt=\"Chrome's 'Search Settings' \" width=\"445\" height=\"170\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Now, you&#8217;ll use search operators to get a list of useful sites.\u00a0 In my example, which is just one of many ways you could generate useful results, I&#8217;m going to do a search for potential guest blogging opportunities on music-related blogs.\u00a0 To do this, you&#8217;d do a search for something like this:<\/p>\n<p><em>inurl:&#8221;write for us&#8221; music<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 Probably a good sign that they&#8217;d be open to a guest post!<\/p>\n<h3>Time to Scrape<\/h3>\n<p><strong><\/strong>Now, you&#8217;ll need to scrape the results so you that can get the URLs into Excel.\u00a0 To do this, just place your cursor over the title tag of the first result.\u00a0 Then, right click and choose &#8216;scrape similar,&#8217; which is an option in your right click menu once you have the Scraper extension installed.\u00a0 <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; margin: 10px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;\" title=\"Time to Scrape\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/Right-Click-Menu.png?resize=549%2C296\" alt=\"Time to Scrape\" width=\"549\" height=\"296\" border=\"0\" \/>In the scraper tool window that will open, click the &#8216;Export to Google Docs&#8217; button.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Copy the entire column of URLs and paste them into the first column of the Business Hut spreadsheet.<a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/pasting-urls.png\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"background-image: none; margin: 10px auto; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; display: block; float: none; padding-top: 0px; border: 0px;\" title=\"pasting-urls\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/pasting-urls_thumb.png?resize=604%2C374\" alt=\"pasting-urls\" width=\"604\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h3>Importing the Data<\/h3>\n<p>The next step is to use the SEOmoz API to generate data for each URL.\u00a0 Luckily, the spreadsheet you downloaded from Business Hut is all set up do this.\u00a0 You just need to go to the SEOmoz API page and generate your API credentials if you don&#8217;t have them.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>One tip on this part of the process:\u00a0 if you just generated your API credentials, wait about 10 minutes before running the spreadsheet or you&#8217;ll get a lot of blank rows in your data.<\/p>\n<h3>Your Colorful New Spreadsheet<\/h3>\n<p><strong><\/strong><br \/>\nAfter running the spreadsheet, it will populate with SEOmoz data.\u00a0 Eventually, you&#8217;ll have a list of 100 or so URLs, plus all kinds of great metrics for each one.\u00a0 Having all of these URLs in one spreadsheet alone is tremendously helpful, and having all of the data about each one is even better.\u00a0 Remember, you can sort by any of the columns if you want to order the URLs by any metric in particular.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this technique doesn&#8217;t replace communicating with site owners and developing relationships.\u00a0 But, it does give you a great place to start.\u00a0 I hope you have fun using this technique to build links!\u00a0 Feel free to comment if you have any questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We all know that high-quality inbound links are an essential ingredient in an SEO campaign.\u00a0 We also all know that it can be extremely time consuming, and sometimes frustrating, looking around the web for sites to approach for links.\u00a0 I&#8217;m going to show you one technique for quickly putting together a list of sites that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[149,1073,219,1487,857],"class_list":["post-4435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seo","tag-backlinks","tag-guesting-writing","tag-link-building-strategies","tag-seo","tag-seomoz","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/pasting-urls_thumb.png?fit=604%2C374","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pJPdG-19x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.evolutionarydesigns.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}