4 Link Researching Tools That You Should Know About

The professionals and experts within the SEO industry know the importance of having ‘tools’ to help them along way, mostly for helping them save time on tasks that would otherwise take forever to complete, if done manually.

We’ve come a long way in the development of tactics and methods of finding out about our competition, but not only that, we are now able to monitor our own sites health with the use of tools that promise to give you the latest results on your backlinks and rankings across the web.

The greatest benefit of course, is the ability to stay up to date with what is going on around your website, and who is linking to your content from where. Content publishing platforms like WordPress offer the ability to track pingbacks and trackbacks, but that isn’t even remotely close to the quality of data that a rank monitoring tool can offer.

Google analytic’s can come pretty close, if you know your way around tracking inbound/outbound links. It’s much easier to just signup to one of these services and use them for the time being. They’re pricey (some offer free plans), but the data you’re able to get is pretty much priceless.

LinkResearchTools.com

Link Research Tools

LRT is a pretty large company that has been around for long enough to earn it’s place in this list. You can start exploring LRT by watching this video first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Zkdh0o2012U

It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, or a community manager. The package of tools that come with LRT once you subscribe is beyond comprehension and will take you some time to get used to! It does of course mean that you will be able to see what your competition is up to, and see part of your site where you could improve link wise.

You’re looking at solid $200+ a month to gain access to all of these tools, so I’d probably stay away for a while unless you’re managing a huge blog / website.

Among the 20 tools that LRT offers you’ll find Link Detox for cleaning up low quality links (saves incredible amount of time), Link Juice Thief which will help you find which sites authority websites link to – so you can then try and get backlinks from those sites, instead of trying to get links from an authority site directly.

Backlinks Profiler will help you analyze a single website and gain all of the necessary information about it, in order to see what type of links it is using and what are your chances of getting links like that.

Head over to the tour page and find out more yourself!

MajesticSEO.com

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is probably one of the most known backlink tools out there, at least to my knowledge. It’s also one of the most nicest and offers an amazing free plan for everyone who is interested. The free plan features the ability to have a single site (yours, preferably) analyzed at no cost.

Majestic SEO offers plenty of tools to make analyzing your keywords and backlink data much easier. The price for a standard plan starts at $50/pm, which once again might seem a little bit steep for smaller sites. I’d recommend playing around with the free plan and see where it takes you.

Ahrefs.com

Ahrefs

I remember the day when Ahrefs first came out, at that point I had no idea of the benefits from using such a tool – but as the time went by, I realized it’s a magnificent tool that should be on everyone’s tools list, especially so if you want to track your backlinks and create SEO reports.

The professional plan starts at $79/pm, and will give you access to all of the SEO tools. You’ll also get the ability to track social metrics, something that the free demo plan doesn’t get.

The one thing that Ahrefs also manage to stand out with is the modern and sleek design which is really comforting and easy to adapt to.

Head over to the FAQs page to learn more!

RavenTools.com

Raven Tools

Raven Tools isn’t just a backlink checking tool, it’s a full-scale marketing powerhouse that should be in every marketers ‘must have’ tool list. You’re allowed to try the tool for 30-Days completely free of charge, to get a feel of it, and then continue using it for $99/pm, if you find it appealing and useful. The best thing is that most of the tools come with unlimited usage (something that many of the companies above limit strictly).

Some of the features of Raven Tools:

  • keyword tracking
  • social monitor
  • site audit
  • backlink explorer
  • site finder

Tons more, see them all here.

The price and the amount of tools is what makes Raven Tools so appealing, give the free trial a spin and see what you can learn about your own site and your competition!

I published this post and shortly after Nate Baker left this comment:

It’s worth noting that in Raven you can pull in link data from both Moz and MajesticSEO. That’s enough link data for lots of folks but some of our users subscribe to multiple tools outside of Raven as well, especially if they have heavy link building operations.

That makes it that much more appealing than it already did! I mean, it’s a fantastic deal and I couldn’t imagine passing it up :)