A few weeks ago, Aaron Wall and Geordie Carswell launched a new PPC Training and Community Forum. This is an excellent place to learn about PPC for both newbies (like me) and experienced paid search marketers. With 50 (!) training modules, a very helpful and knowledgeable community and 11 very useful PPC tools, PPC Blog’s training center has a lot to offer. Link builders can learn a lot from doing PPC (and vice versa), so I’d highly recommend you to check it out. Just read the PPC blog, and you’ll get a feeling of what quality you can expect.

To prove that it’s not for PPC marketers only, I’ll highlight one of the tools from PPC Blog’s arsenal that can be used during a link building campaign as well.

The Local Keyword Tool

One of PPC Blog’s tools is the Local Keyword Tool, which you can use to create a large set of locally targeted keywords. However, you can also use it to create search queries that help you find local link targets. Just enter the zipcode of the region that you’re targeting (it currently works for eight countries, but this number will get higher) and a radius, and the tool will generate a list with relevant locations.

Click to enlarge

After the list with zip codes, communities, counties, states, and state codes has shown up, you can enter two additional keyword groups. Try adding keywords relevant to your products or services (plumbing, flowers, lawyer) in the first one, and adding some additional keywords like resources, articles, listings or blog in the second one. The third column can be used for the locations.

Click to enlarge

There you go: a very long list with search queries that you can use to find new local link targets. Not bad for a PPC tool, huh?

PS – For those of you wondering, yes, I will be updating this page soon, hopefully later this month…

Update: Darren Shaw of Whitespark.ca informed me about his Local Citation Finder Tool that is released on August 5th. The output of the tool will look something like this, which can be very useful for local websites.

I have written about useful link building tools here in more than one occasion, but I still get questions about which tools to use (or not) quite regularly. This made me decide to write reviews of the most useful and/ or well-known link building tools available on the market.

The first set of reviews includes reviews of four free link building tools, and six paid link building tools. One of these paid link building tools is Influence Finder, a great tool that is being launched at SMX Advanced London at this very moment.

I will continue to add new tools to the list of tools, starting with the tools that I have already listed. If you want me to review your tool, or to test a tool you’ve heard of and want to know if it’s any good, feel free to let me know.

Free link building tools

Link Diagnosis
Majestic SEO Free tools
MyBlogGuest (coming soon)
Open Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer

Premium link building tools

Advanced Link Manager
BuzzStream (coming soon)
Enquisite Linker (coming soon)
Influence Finder
Link Assistant (coming soon)
Link Research Tools
Majestic SEO
Ontolo Link Building Toolkit (coming soon)
Raven SEO Tools (coming soon)
SEObook Premium Tools
SEOmoz Premium Tools

You can find all link building tools I have reviewed, or will be reviewing in the near future, right here: link building tools.

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.

There are lots and lots of link building tools, but good and useful link building tools are very rare. LinkDiagnosis and Majestic SEO are both awesome for analyzing purposes and both SEObook and Internet Marketing Ninjas offer a few great other (paid) tools for link building. But that’s about it.

Earlier this week, however, I received an email from the folks at BuzzStream, a new ‘Relationship and link building tool’, offering a peek at what they’ve built. Although the tool is still in beta, it already looks very promising. From their site:

BuzzStream for Link Building is a fully integrated set of tools designed to help you gain inbound links and improve search rankings in a systematic, fully scalable way. The secret lies in creating more effective outreach, by streamlining link research and dramatically enhancing your tracking capabilities.

BuzzStream for PR and Social Media Marketing is an integrated web-based toolset that can help you manage and optimize your word-of-mouth marketing activities. The key is more effective relationship-building — in a manageable way.

A nifty functionality is the BuzzMark bookmarklet, that -when you click on it- scans for the contact info and some additional data of the website you’re visiting. This tool can save you a lot of time, and other BuzzStream features can save you from a lot of data entry and frustration as well. The BuzzStream Team -Jeremy, Paul and Pam- are blogging and Tweeting quite actively, in order to receive more input from the audience and improve the tool even further. Dedication builds better tools.

The best thing about the tool, in my opinion, is that they don’t want to automate the entire process of link marketing, but they want to make the process easier. It’s not link building software, but a link administration help.

The good folks of BuzzStream had 20 spare Beta invites laying around, which means that I can offer access to the (still free) service to the first 20 people who leave a comment (or drop me an email).

This is the living proof that you really should consider guest posting from time to time. A guest post from Janusz on Blogstorm.co.uk pointed me to his link analysis tool; Link Diagnosis. This is a great FireFox plugin, that analyzes link profiles very thoroughly. Check out the post at Blogstorm for some screen shots or check it out yourself.

Earlier this week, I StumbledUpon Michelle MacPhearson’s blog (see, it works). On her blog, I noticed a weird plugin next to the PlugIM and Sphinn buttons. When I clicked it, I was quite impressed.

There are several audio tools and plugins available for blogs, but I never came across one that was 100% understandable. The one Michelle uses, Odiogo, actually is. Because of a good intonation, Odiogo offers “Near-human” quality text-to-speech.

I decided to give Odiogo a try as well. It also offers stats, so I can remove it again if nobody uses it. This means that you can listen to SEO related posts while jogging or travveling, but it also means that Wiep.net is available for the audially disabled from now on.