Great content is the solid foundation of a good website, a positive user experience and (hopefully) some nice incoming links. This, in turn, usually leads to good rankings, a continuous stream of traffic, conversions, and -eventually- a fat bank account. Easy, right?

Well, what if you can’t come up with new ideas for good content? You can either start brainstorming for new ideas, or you can get to work straight away. A very effective way to combine this, is to create resource lists, and to add these to your website.

I have created resource lists (lists with a few links to other high quality, relevant web pages) for multiple websites in the past, and it’s been effective in every single one of these occasions. Resource lists not only add direct value to your website, but they can also help you to attract links and traffic.

Resource lists for a better user experience

For all of you who are still afraid of their website ‘leaking PageRank’, here’s an update: Linking out is not a bad thing! And again, in bold: Linking out is not a bad thing! Actually, linking out can be a very good thing. Especially in informational sections of your website, links to other websites can be great additions.

Believe it or not, but in most cases, your website is not your visitor’s end station. And when you can give the 97,3% of the visitors that does not buy something on your website a new place to go to, you still have made their user experience a little bit better than when you wouldn’t have provided those links.

Linking out also shows that you are not afraid of directing visitors to other interesting websites, and that you know your way around online, which both can increase your brand perception. Especially in niches where people aren’t used to it, but appreciate the added value. Some even go further by stating that linking out to authority websites may (indirectly) lead to better search engine rankings – I don’t believe this, but it shows how positive some people think about linking out and creating topical association.

Resource lists for content ideas

Forcing yourself to create one or more resource lists also is excellent for coming up with new content ideas.

When you are visiting dozens of websites, trying to find good content, you will learn what you like, and more importantly why. Although n=1, this can definitely give you more insight in why people will or will not link to specific content. Fully understanding this is key to success.

You will also find out what your industry is still missing in terms of good content, which -of course- can be created by you then. The same goes for good ideas that have been executed badly; improving those ideas is something that you owe to The Internet.

Resource lists for new links

Creating resource lists can also be a good link building tactic. First of all, it’s a great way to get noticed or to network. Linking out to someone, and perhaps sending him or her some traffic, may put yourself on that person’s radar. Especially when he or she is a blogger, as most bloggers are incurable stats junkies. Use this connection as an opening to get in touch with bloggers or webmasters you have always wanted to get links from.

You can also try to push it a little bit more. Simply letting the people you are linking to know where your resource list is can be enough sometimes.

My personal experience is that you can get an average email-to-link conversion rate of ~25% without even asking for a link. Just explain where and why you have linked to the person you’re contacting, and some will link back to your page almost instantly. Others may send you (positive) feedback, or mention that “If they ever can do something for you…”.

Something as simple as this can already do the trick:

Hi John,

When I was doing research for my own website, I came across yours (URL). I absolutely loved {page}, because of {reason} – in fact, I loved it so much that I linked to it at {URL}, and I thought you would like to know.

Please let me know if you want me to make any changes to the link, or if you prefer me to link to a different URL.

Kind regards,

Your Name
Email, URL, etc.

Of course, the ideal approach, as well as the average conversion rate may depend on your industry, brand and content quality, but 25% isn’t bad when getting new links isn’t even your main, or only goal.

What makes a good resource list?

I know it may be tempting, but I am *not* suggesting that you should instantly download a php directory script, or that adding 20+ resource pages with dozens of links to other websites to your site might be a good idea. After all, linking out to irrelevant, too many, bad or mediocre websites can harm your brand or reputation.

A good resource page offers extra value to your visitors, because the links on it are highly relevant to your website, and support the content of the page.

In fact, a resource list doesn’t even have to be a separate resource page. For example, you could add links to existing pages, develop an image directory, or you could try to create a dynamic blog sidebar – nearly anything is possible.

Well, there you go: need content ideas or links? Link out!

About a year ago, I made a selection of a few (in my opinion) indispensable link building tools. Except from a Majestic SEO redesign and some changes to the Link Diagnosis tool, I haven’t seen any big changes in the field of link building tools since then. Well, until this month…

Here’s three great new tools you can use during your link building campaigns.

Link Building Queries

The guys from Ontolo created Link Building Queries, a search query generating tool, mainly based on a massive list with link building queries.

After entering a keyword that’s related to your product or website, you can enter a linkable asset type, an opportunity type, and the type of content you’re after. When you hit ‘Generate link building queries’, Garrett French himself tries to come up with useful queries in the background, and spits them out lightning fast. And the output looks somewhat like this (depending on what you’ve selected, of course);

This tool can be very helpful when you’re looking for specific link targets.

Bulk link checker

Majestic SEO already had a handful of free tools, but they have added a lightning fast Bulk Link Checker to their arsenal this month. This tool will check the amount of linking pages and referring domains to up to 150 (!) URLs in just a split second. It uses Majestic’s own data, and also has the option to download the results in CSV.

I had to edit the results a little bit to make it fit on this page, but you can click it to see the real output. Or you could go and play with the tool…

Open Site Explorer

The third tool in this list was just released yesterday. The Open Site Explorer, an SEOmoz product, provides quite some insights in the link profile of a website. You can check the regular basic link data, but SEOmoz has also added a few very nice features.

One of these features is the opportunity to check which URLs 301-redirect to a certain domain, which makes bait-n-switch pages or redirected domains for SEO purposes easy to find.

(click to see the bigger picture)

Another interesting functionality is the option to compare two different domains. Just enter two URLs, hit enter, and you’ll see some pretty charts, accompanied by very interesting data.

(click the image to see the bigger picture, or click here to see the live data)

The Open Site Explorer is part of SEOmoz’ Pro membership, but you can still try it out for free for about a day or so. After that, the metrics, 10K links and the CSV download will be PRO-only.

All by all three great tools to add to your link building toolbox.

Just recently, I used crowdSPRING’s creative community for designing the logo of a new project website. The process went according plan; there were a few good entries and I picked a winning logo. Quickly after that, I received the files I requested, and as soon as I left the designer a positive rating (in other words: when I still was in a very happy mood), I received an email:

Hi Wiep,

I wanted to send a personal note and thank you so much for using crowdSPRING. We’re thrilled to have you as a customer and hope that your experience was positive.

Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to help you or your company going forward. We’d also value any feedback you have on the crowdSPRING website or on your experience in general. We very much appreciate user’s thoughts: good, bad or in-between. And, last but not least, we greatly appreciate any way you might help us to spread the word – in fact, a simple blog entry about your experience is the best possible compliment you could ever give us. We promise to reciprocate any way we can…

Thanks again for being a part of our young community,

Best regards,

It’s a simple email, thanking me for the business we did, asking for feedback, and mentioning that spreading the word (for example a blog post) would be appreciated. It’s a short, honest and to-the-point email, and although it wasn’t in the style I was used from crowdSPring, this short blog post proves that it works.

Do you sell products online? Take a good look at the approach above, and ask yourself how you can implement something similar. It’s simple (it can even be automated), but can be very effective.

Recently, I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin for Wordpress, to keep an eye on my outgoing links. You could also use Xenu Link Sleuth to do this, but having a plugin doing this regularly, and to see the broken links show up in your WP dashboard makes it much more actionable. And even better: cleaning up the broken links only takes a few minutes.

The first report of the Broken Link Checker listed 92 broken links, out of a total of nearly 2,000 links. When ran through this list manually, I noticed that most of the broken links were the result of a new URL structure and bad redirection. Because I wanted to keep most of the links intact (I linked to them in the past, so they should probably still be link worthy, right?), I tried to find the new URL of the 404-ing page first. If the search functionality of the site didn’t point me to the right page, I just dropped the link. Of the 92 broken links, I had to drop 49, which is more than half of them…

What I found most shocking, was that about 75% of all the broken links pointed to web savvy sites, including several SEO blogs. Making sure that you redirect all pages properly when you adjust your URL structure, and checking your 404 statistics regularly both seem pretty basic SEO skills to me.

With new (popular) plugins like this, and with smart folks chasing down other people’s 404s to build links, I’d strongly advise you to keep a close eye on your 404 statistics…

A good link building toolbox is invaluable. Some tools provide extra information or insights, while others  point you to possible new link targets. Using a combination of various tools can without a doubt lead to analysis paralysis, but the right set of tools (and no more!) can put you in the right link building direction. In this post, I’m not going to name all link building tools, but simply the ones that I use.

There are a few different types of tools that you can use for link building (I’m not talking about link building software here, btw), of which the most important ones are listed below.

One-click Analysis Tools

When you need to know simple things, like the amount of links that point to a specific page or domain according to Yahoo!, or which anchor text is being used (too) often, you need tools who give you this information in just a few clicks. One-click analysis tools are great to give you some quick insights in the situation of a website, but they come short when you’re performing an in-depth analysis.

SearchStatus

Actually, Quirk’s SearchStatus isn’t exactly a tool, but a collection of features in a single Firefox plugin. Useful information, such as Google TBPR, page- and domain links via Yahoo! SiteExplorer, whois information, Google’s cache of the page you’re visiting, an on-page link report and Archive.org are just a mouse click away. SearchStatus also provides the option to highlight all nofollow links, which is a very useful addition as well.

LinkDiagnosis

LinkDiagnosis, which is available as a web based tool and as Firefox plugin, is like the Yahoo! SiteExplorer on crack. It tries to filter out all low quality links (not always with success), provides a list of common anchor texts, and tries to create a list with the most popular pages of the domain you’re investigating.

A big benefit of LinkDiagnosis is that you can download the data (export=good :)) as a csv file, and use it in the way you want it.

The speed of the tool depends on the size of the backlink profile you’re investigating. A small site will only take a few seconds, but it may take LinkDiagnosis somewhat longer (up to about half an hour) to create a report of a site with a larger backlink profile.

When you need a general overview of a link profile, want an estimation of what the most important pages (in terms of incoming links) of a domain are, or what the anchor text spreading is, LinkDiagnosis is to tool to go to.

In-Depth Analysis Tools

When you need more detailed information, for example when you’re investigating your own website, or your competitor’s, you need tools that go more into depth. These tools might show link building efforts, structures, or maybe even data from the past.

Although Google’s Webmaster Tools also can provide quite some link related info, I’m not going to mention this one, because it can only be used for your own sites, and not -for instance- competitors.

MajesticSEO

Both SEOmoz’ Linkscape and MajesticSEO try to create a (near) complete index of the web for SEO purposes. While Linkscape has a far more user friendly user interface, I prefer Majestic, because it can deliver a broader range of data, and because all data (instead of a limited amount) can be downloaded in csv format. MajesticSEO is free to use for your own site (verification required), but you have to pay for detailed competitor reports. MajesticSEO also has a (free) Bad Neighborhood Checker, which lists up to 25 domains on your IP address (both C and D class) sorted by the amount of backlinks.

The biggest ‘problem’ of MajesticSEO, is that it provides so much information, that it may be a data overload for some. To name a few things Majestic can do for you:

• Provide ‘normal’ information, such as anchor text use, or your most popular pages (sorted by incoming links)
• Show all incoming links of a domain sorted by TLD or country
• List all incoming links of a domain sorted by complete or C-class IP adress
• Give a separated view of the total amount of incoming links and the total amount of referring domains
• Show only links in frames, nofollow links, image links or redirect links
• Links from the past (excellent info when you take on a new client!)

Another great feature of Majestic is their Compare domain backlink history tool, which can compare the backlink discovery of up to five websites. This can be very useful when you want to keep track of your link building efforts, or if you want to spot anomalities in the link growth of your competitors. The functionality to investigate specific link discovery date ranges makes is very easy to determine what kind of link building or PR efforts caused a specific spike in new links.

One thing that you have to keep in mind, though, is that MajesticSEO shows you data of when they discovered new links, and not when these links were actually placed. The overall pattern is usually ok, but the actual dates can be a bit off.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Where MajesticSEO is awesome for off-site link research, Xenu’s Link Sleuth is excellent for on-site analysis. This tool, which tries to act as a search engine crawler, checks websites for broken links and displays a continuously updated list of URLs, which can be sorted by different criteria.

Link Sleuth is the perfect tool to give you an overview of your website (and internal link) structure, because it lists all incoming internal links per page, anchor text of links (or page title) and the depth level of each page. If an important page rests at level seven (7 clicks away from the home page) with just one incoming link, you know something is wrong.

The tool also shows you which of the pages you link to, both external and internal pages, return a 404 error. While Google Webmaster Tools also provides information about which of your URLs return a 404 error (a great place to start your link building campaign, btw), it doesn’t list off-site pages that return a 404. You can either remove these dead links from your pages, or contact the webmaster of the site, and ask if something went wrong (wink, wink).

You can also use Link Sleuth to run a report of a website you really want to get a link from. If you can spot a few dead links, you’ve found yourself a great opening to start communication with the webmaster of that particular site.

Link Target Tools

Now that you’ve analyzed the crap out of your own website and your competitors’, it’s time to use some tools that help you find new link targets.

Hubfinder

SEObook’s Hubfinder looks for sites which have co occurring links to related authoritative websites on a particular topic. The tool used to be free, but it is now only accessible for paid SEObook members. However, there are still a few (free) mirrors available, which allows you to play around with the tool a little bit.

You can enter up to ten (or even 20 with the paid version) competing websites, and Hubfinder looks for websites that link to at least two of these competing sites. You can also add your own website, so you can filter out all sites that already link to you very easily.

The result is a list of multiple (this can vary from a few dozen to a few hundred) websites that link to several of your competitors, but not to you. Excellent link targets, if you ask me.

The only thing you have to do yourself, is filter out all the low quality sites. The co-citation tool uses Yahoo! to gather results, which means that Dmoz clones, guestbooks and other low quality pages are usually included in the list of link targets.

Link Harvester

Link Harvester, another SEObook tool, shows unique domains linking to a site, including the IP address and unique C block addresses of the links. It also highlights links from .edu, .gov, .mil., and .ac.uk domains, as these links might have greater impact. It includes links to archive.org, whois, Google cache, and several other useful sites near each link, and also contains an export functionality.

SEOmoz Link Finder

SEOmoz’ Link Finder is a good tool to help you get going with finding potential new link targets via search engines. When you enter some basic information, such as your URL, a few important keywords, two competitors and your location, Link Finder creates a list of queries that may help you find relevant websites that might be willing to link to you.

This list contains search operators that lead to general directories, such as SEO + “submit your site” for example, local directories, relevant social media sites and competitor related queries.

Both SEObook and SoloSeo have a tool with the same goal, but I find Link Finder just a tad more complete, or more easy to use.

One thing that I definitely should add, is that you should never rely on link building tools only. Although the right toolbox can definitely help a lot, not a single tool can add creativity to your link marketing campaign. Tools are just a way to take a look at what your competition is doing, to find low hanging fruit, and to get you in the right direction.

If you happen to use any tools that you think are indispensable as well, feel free to share them in the comments.