Free SEO Link-Building Tool – Linkdiagnosis: Checking Inbound links for SEO

It’s a well known SEO fact that Google rewards sites that have good inbound links for SEO. This is why people want to click here for ideas on how to do this well to avoid being penalised. But what is meant by a good link? By these we mean –

• Link Syntax – inbound links that link to your website and use the proper syntax, i.e., have the ‘keyword’ inside the A HREF target.
• Link Authority – inbound links from other sites that enjoy high Google PageRank for SEO, and ideally are in your ‘community.’
• Link Quantity – more is better. Lots of inbound links that have good syntax and good PageRank.

Getting all three is what I call the Link Trifecta. But how do you identify SEO Link targets? There are quite a few ways, but one of the best is to use a great free tool from Linkdiagnosis. Your objective is to –

• Identify your Google Competitors, sites similar to yours that are doing well on your target keyword searches.
• Input their home page or other strong URL into one of the free tools.
• Build a list of ‘link targets’ by researching who links to your competitor, writing down their URL’s, and beginning the process of soliciting your competitors links.

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Yahoo has a good link tool called Yahoo Site Explorer, but I actually prefer the tool from Linkdiagnosis.com. It’s free and runs only in Firefox. To get it go to http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/ and sign up for your free account. Again, it only runs on Firefox, so if you do not have Firefox, you’ll have to download that free browser as well from http://www.firefox.com/.

Once you have downloaded and installed the Linkdiagnosis plug in, here’s what you do. It can be a little slow, so I have preloaded a report for a New York Wedding Photographer, http://www.christianothstudio.com. Imagine that you are also a New York wedding photographer. Christian Oth Studio performs very well on searches such as New York Wedding Photographer, and one of the reasons is that the site enjoys many high quality inbound links. So your mission is to reverse engineer who links to Christian Oth, and then solicit links from those sites.

Remember the difference between competitive sites and complementary sites. The former are your direct competitors, and will not link to you. The latter can be blogs, magazines, directories, and the link that may link to you. You are using Christian Oth’s to quickly identify complementary websites and build out your SEO link target list.

So log in to the Linkdiagnosis tool. Input the home page URL into the tool, and hit Start. It may take the tool some time, so go get a cup of coffee or watch some TV. For a large site it can take quite a long time. Once the report generates the tool provides you a series of columns –

• Page URL – the page that links inbound to your competitor.
• Page Rank – this is the Google PageRank of that specific page. Remember higher PageRanks are better!
• Anchor – the anchor text is the text that is nested inside the A HREF tag. Remember that proper syntax means keywords are included in the A HREF tag!
• Link Type – the main thing here is it will identify links that have the NO FOLLOW attribute, which as you know emasculates the vote on Google (not good).
• Other Columns – the other columns are Linkdiagnosis efforts to weigh the value of a link from this page, such as looking at the number of outbound links, etc.

You can sort by PageRank and double click on any site to go to that site. The tool has done the hard work for you of identifying potential link targets, and you can prioritize by PageRank. It’s cool! And it’s free! If you would rather another party placed link for you, you could enlist the help of a Link Building Company.

As you do this for a few of your better competitors, you need to create an SEO inbound link, To Do list.

1. Identify potential competitors to plug into Linkdiagnosis.com
2. Generate a Linkdiagnosis report for each.
3. Sort by PageRank, and click over to each potential inbound link target.
4. Evaluate as a link target, and if it fits your needs, identify the method by which you can solicit a link. Blogs might have one method, directories another, and complementary websites still another.

SEO link building is very much a human-to-human effort. Beyond simple directories, you need to think creatively and create WIN/WIN strategies for these potential link targets. But Linkdiagnosis is a great free tool, and using it speed up the first step. I especially like the data it gives on PageRank and the NO FOLLOW attribute.

Good luck!