How to find prospects for link building Posted by Eric Enge on 24 June 2010

Wordtracker Link Builder finds you prospects for your link building. Here Eric Enge, co-author of The Art of SEO Book, shows you how to use the filter function to quickly search thousands of links to find targets relevant for specific link building campaigns.

On June 2nd, Wordtracker unveiled Wordtracker Link Builder, its new link building tool. The underlying data is from Majestic SEO, so the data set in Link Builder is large and robust. When I discussed the new product with Ken McGaffin, the Chief Marketing Officer for Wordtracker, he told me that the company's focus was going to be on providing value-added interfaces for getting at and manipulating the data. In this article I will outline a way to get more value from the tool.

Even on the opening screen you see some of the initial value being built in. For example, I really like the ability to enter a key phrase to start your search for prospects, as you can see on this screenshot:

The output from the tool is simple and elegant:

The above list shows the top 10 search results for the query golf clubs and then presents key data on each, including a link to examine the backlinks in detail. When you click on ‘Show links’ on the golfsmith.com row, you end up with a screenshot as follows:

Each Link Builder search will provide you with up to 1,000 links. Going through that data quickly and efficiently can be time-consuming and difficult. In addition, many link building campaigns focus on a specific audience, so you might not want to manually wade through all that data just to find the sites you are looking for. Link Builder provides a filtering function which allows you to process the data more efficiently. You can see it in this screen grab:

Your imagination should start working pretty quickly here. Imagine that you have a campaign that you want specifically to target colleges and universities. Try using TLDs (top level domains) as a filter, as I show here with ‘.edu’ as the filter:

As you can see, a list of .EDU links to the site shows up. Now you can focus on just these links for your campaign. Obviously, you can do this with any TLD, although TLDs such as .com, .org, and .net probably don't provide a lot of value for purposes of filtering. However, country TLDs, such as .uk, .de, .fr, and others could be quite useful.

Another link building campaign might focus specifically on bloggers. You may be trying to get them to write about your product or service. You can find some relevant bloggers by filtering on 'blog':

You can of course also use keyword phrases in the filter function. For a golf site you might filter for ‘putters’ and ‘putting’ if you are planning a campaign targeting sales of putters. This may give you a number of other slices of the data.

Using the filter function in this way will enable you to more efficiently extract the data and target your results to your link building campaigns.

You can save the results of your campaign-led searches in lists, appropriately called ‘campaigns’. Just check the wanted sites and then click ‘Save’:

You can then return to your lists of prospects within your campaigns and use them to monitor progress and communications …

Here are ‘My Campaigns’:

Here are the first four prospects in my ‘golf blogs’ campaign:

You can then use the Status settings and Notes fields to monitor progress in each link building campaign. Ken McGaffin explores this in A quick guide to Link Builder article.

I know from my discussion with Ken that Wordtracker has many more things in the pipeline, so watch closely for new developments!

Try Link Builder today