Link building is regarded as the most crucial aspect of SEO. It refers to the backlinks from other sites to your website or blog.
It matters because a search engine has no way to understand the material and decide if it is good or bad. A search engine looks for the number of external sites linking in to determine the veracity.
Backlinks are highly regarded by SEO experts and digital marketers. 92% of marketers believe it will remain an important criterion in search algorithms after five years.
Of course, these links can’t be from any site. Backlinks from social media sites, e.g., Facebook or Twitter, amount to little in terms of link building strategy.
As far as possible, the incoming links have to be from reputed websites. Since 94% of the internet has no incoming links, it is easy to imagine how difficult it is to earn them.
Link farming shortcuts (such as using a private blog network) would earn any site a permanent downgrade. You have to obtain your backlinks through ethical avenues.
The task is onerous, and tools help to lessen the burden. We explore the five best link building tools you can avail of at very little cost.
Five Best Link Building Tools in 2021
1. Majestic SEO
In recent years Majestic SEO has become one of the most popular link building tools. The main feature is what the company calls Link Intelligence data.
Majestic SEO can analyze many aspects of links. The most valuable are:
Citation Flow, a measure of the number of backlinks a site has. Citation Flow does not judge the quality of the site providing the link but focuses on the number of links.
Trust Flow refers to backlink quality. For this, Majestic SEO delves into its huge database of websites. You would need high Citation Flow as well as Trust Flow to rank well in search.
In addition, you can easily investigate what your competition is doing.
Are their backlinks originating from a directory or blog or review?
The nature of the surrounding material – text or images?
If several of the backlinks are from images, it means they create infographics or similar material that is widely quoted.
Where is the backlink located – top, middle, or footer?
To get a better idea, you can use a restricted free version.
Majestic SEO offers a Lite and Pro plan at $49 and $99 per month, respectively. Besides, they offer a full API version meant for SEO agencies that costs $399 every month and offers access to 5 users and 100 million analysis units.
2. MozBar
Moz is well known for its Domain Authority scoring (Google never makes their DA score public). MozBar is an easy way to get access to Moz data about any website.
It is not a standalone software but piggybacks on a browser – Chrome or Firefox. You have to download and install it from the relevant app store. Mozbar takes the form of a toolbar at the top of the page showing you the Spam Score, Domain Authority, and Page Authority.
You also get to see the Moz Rank of the page you are on (on a scale of 1-10).
These numbers are not only important for your own sites but also for competition. If you rank 39 on DA while they are 62, you have to improve vastly.
Some of the more probing features are behind a paywall. The free version shows you DA score but not keyword analysis and link analysis. The latter can readily reveal if a website adheres to “no-follow” or “do-follow” HTML attributes. This makes contributions for broken link building that much easier.
The premium version (priced between $99 and $599 monthly) also shows Moz Domain Rank, Moz Trust, and various other metrics.
3. Ahrefs Broken Link Checker
Broken link building is a white hat SEO technique that yields solid results.
All that you have to do is zero in on a site from where you would like backlinks and analyze it using Ahrefs Broken Link Checker.
It is available as a web app that runs on your browser and as an extension. Plug in any URL, and it shows results for outbound links and incoming links.
The analyses show Domain Rating, URL Rating, number of referring domains, traffic, anchor text, and backlink URL.
It is a simple tool that can’t take more than a few minutes to master.
Ahrefs Broken Link Checker can analyze the entire site or one subdomain at a time.
The free version displays the first few links from the result page. The cost of the premium version starts at $7 for a week. Weekly purchase is convenient since you are not going to use a backlink checker daily.
The premium version can be scheduled to run at a specific time. Ahrefs claims that it has the world’s largest database on backlinks from 170 million domains.
On another note, not only does Ahrefs Broken Link Checker help you locate opportunities for backlinks, but it allows you to eliminate the same from your site and fix pesky 404 errors.
4. Linkody
Linkody is for use by websites that have had a backlink strategy in place for a few months.
At some point, you would have so many backlinks that it is impossible to monitor them manually using Mozbar.
This is where Linkody steps in. It checks all the backlinks from your site and provides a neat analysis.
Then every few days, it would update the report and highlight the new links. If any backlinks are broken, it would also point out why through 400, 401, 404, 502 errors.
The report also provides you with Moz rank, Alexa ranking, and IP address of the referring domain.
There is another reason why Linkody is essential. When you begin to grow, your rivals might target you with negative SEO by planting your URL in questionable blogs. If they succeed in getting your URL on a link farm, you will get penalized.
Regular weekly reports by Linkody allow you to explain to search engines how exactly it happened. No website developing backlinks at fifty per month through white-hat techniques would suddenly subscribe to a black hat method for a dozen questionable links.
Linkody subscription is priced at $15 to $50 per month based on usage.
5. Ninja Outreach
At some point, you have to reach out to influencers to build quality backlinks. Influencers don’t only mean Nicki Minaj or Kendal Jenner.
They can be in any domain of activity. But how do you find them if they belong to a niche with only 100,000 followers?
Ninja Outreach is an excellent prospecting and outreach tool. Its main aim is to find people who matter so that you can build a relationship. How you leverage that relationship for backlink building (guest blogs, broken links, etc.) depends on you.
How does it find influencers? Ninja Outreach scrapes social media, RSS feeds, blogs for finding names of those who have large amounts of interaction, followers, fans.
All you need to do is type in a keyword (say “french coffee”), and it will display the name of influencers, the number of followers, social profiles, contact email address, SEO, and details of traffic generated. You can generate the report and share it with colleagues from the control panel.
Ninja Outreach is priced at $119 per month. A free trial is available.
Final Thoughts…
The tools we have described above make life a whole lot easier for a website owner. None is better than others because each offers a different value proposition and service.
But what if you don’t have enough expertise to capitalize on them? Not everyone is a lay SEO expert. Most don’t even know what Alexa Rank is (not the Alexa that sings and orders pizza!), let alone Moz Score.
No need to sweat.
A link building company such as Uplers would do the needful at a very reasonable cost. Experts make anything look easy. Within a few months, you would have a ton of exceptional backlinks and enjoy high SERP.
