Review of Advanced Link Manager & Advanced Web Ranking
Posted by admin
Advanced Link Manager
You know the questions that constantly nag an SEO when thinking about link popularity: how many backlinks have I got? What’s the inbound text? What’s the page rank of the inbound link? Has anyone removed a juicy link to me? Who’s linking to my competitors? What inbound link text do my competitors have? Have I got any deeplinks? Where are they linking to? Oh my god, my head is spinning…
To try and deal with all this information, you go to Google :site, you go to to Yahoo: links, you review and review your site and your competitors, then you’ve got to write down all the info, you out it in a spreadsheet, which rapidly gets big and cumbersome, you forget to update it, your head starts to spin even more…yes, welcome to SEO hell…and Enter Advanced Link Manager.
Dudes, this program is simply awesome, it takes all the grunt work out of tracking and analysing links, leaving you to sit back and focus on strategy.
Setting it up is easy, simply enter your URL, select the search engines that you want to check backlinks for (there’s a bunch of options, but let’s face it it, all we care about is Google and Yahoo!) - then Advanced Link Manager goes off and queries those search engines for all available back links to your site.
Of course, not all your links will show up in those search engines - so you’ll want to add tracking for your lovingly crafted list of backlinks that you’ve been building up. That’s easily done, either one by one, or by a batch CSV update.
Once the program has built a list of all pages linking to you (both those it finds from the search engines, and those that you’ve manually added), it goes off and checks those pages, bringing back a wealth of information - not least of which is whether that page does in fact still link to you! Domain info? You got it! Number of outbound links? Page rank? You got it! Inbound link text? Oh baby, you got it!!!
So now what do you do?
Well, for one, keep updating it on a regular basis - manually add the links as you build them, and update the report either by triggering it manually or scheduling it to run late at night (this is a better option if you’ve got a big site with a lot of backlinks, as Link Manager needs time to check all the incoming links - though you can use the “check new only” option if time is short).
My favourite reports:
Inbound link text - this is of course a vital factor in SEO, you don’t want to over-do the money term for the target page, but neither do you want a bunch of random crap, so this report helps you identify what to focus on.
And to keep you motivated, back links over time. If this flat-lines (or worse still, nose-dives!), then you know that your SEO effort has faltered - get back to work!
Want to do some competitor analysis? Just add their URLs in your project, and you can get hold of the same info: who’s linking, the value of that link, and the inbound link text. Sit back, take a look - can you identify a winning pattern? Can you duplicate it? Can you get a link from the same source?
Want more? There’s even a feature to enter the keywords you want to target - Advanced Link Manager will then check the search results, and then analyse the backlinks of the sites that appear in the search results! Like I said, no more grunt work 
Advanced Link Manager is available in a variety of license options depending on your needs, and in both Windoze and Apple flavours - and best of all, they have a 30-day free trial! Download it, try it out on your next SEO project, and be amazed at how much you can achieve.
Advanced Web Rankings
As an SEO, there are basic reporting and reviewing activities that you need to do on a regular basis to check your website ranking. These reports are your bread and butter, your whole raison d’etre as an SEO, and include:
- Where you are ranking for your target SERPs
- Where your competitors are ranking for your target SERPs
If, like me, you obsessively check your search engine rankings, then I’m sure that you’ve wished there was an easier way to do it. You probably not only want to know where you rank today, but where you ranked yesterday, last week, last month - and hey, wasn’t that guy below me last week? Damn, I can’t quite remember - did I take a screenshot of the SERPs? Now, where’d I put it? What else does he rank for anyway?!?
Well, I’ve discovered a great tool that gives you a wealth of information, and now I’m wondering how I managed without it. The tool is Advanced Web Rankings, and I’m in lurve…
My favourite features
- Selecting the right search engine: I have sites that target regional search engines, in their native languages. I don’t care about ranking on google.com, I want google.es in Spanish, or google.de in German - I want to know where I’m ranking on those
- Filter the rankings report based on search engine, website, and keyword - great for drilling down!
- The handy Keyword Research Tool
- Set up a scheduled task to automatically check the SERPs - ok, nothing beats actually taking a look at the SERPs themselves, but let Advanced Web Rankings alert you to when there’s been a change worth looking at!
Easy competitor review
Monitoring the competition - it’s as simple as clicking the “Top Sites” tab, then checking out the report. Combine this with Advanced Link Manager to analyse your competior’s backlinks, and you’ve got a powerful winning combination!
Advanced Web Rankings is available in a variety of license options depending on your needs, and in both Windoze and Apple flavours - and best of all, they have a 30-day free trial! Download it, try it out on your next SEO project, and be amazed at how much you can achieve.
101 left-field ideas for link-building
Posted by admin
- Join local chambers of commerce, they should link to you, and they are usually linked to by .gov sites and .edu sites. Write articles for the local chamber and they will link to you.
- Rent a managed server and offer to host nonprofits for free or at a deep discount, and they will link to you, and they are usually linked to by .gov sites and .edu sites.
- If your are a developer, offer your services for free or at a deep discount, to others, and they will link to you.
- Provide a place for anyone to publish content for free or at a deep discount, and they will link to you.
- Provide a quick reference to specific [ niche ] content sites, and they will link to you.
- Publish your local sunrise, sunset times, daylight hours, and average temperatures etc, and they will link to you.
- Create a flash of a street billboard as it changes over the year on a corner near you, and they will link to you.
- Create a two page formatted page layout as a test, and explain the process of doing it, and they will link to you.
- Be nice to people in forums, and they will link to you
- Join forums where there are profile pages, link back to yourself. If the profile doesn’t get indexed quickly enough, try linking to it yourself
- Be an active participant on forums and blogs that allow link-dropping in posts. Spamming will get you thrown out, but useful posts won’t.
- Write in your own blogs. New blog post + blogroll = new link to sites in blogroll
- Write a blog post about something on one of your sites, and include the link naturally in the blog post. Works better if it’s not obvious that the blog and the site are both yours! (And be nice - link to other sites as well, not just yours.)
- Social interaction of any type leads to links. Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it. Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards. Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships.
A big thanks to Minnapple over at WebMasterWorld for the thought-provoking original post.