Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool has had an upgrade of late – making it much much easier to find link prospects - the sites that might link back to you. In our third of three articles highlighting the new features of Link Builder, I’ll be looking at how you can easily collect more detailed information on your prospects and then sell your site more effectively. In short, our new feature called ‘tags’ makes getting links easier. Here’s how.

What is it?

Link building is all about having a laser-like focus on the sites that you want a link from. Link Builder was created to make this as easy as possible by serving your link building prospects up on a plate, but you’ll need to visit their sites to give you the information you need to help build up a meaningful relationship.

With tags, you can add notes to your prospects, helping you create the link building campaign that’s right for your own site.

How tags can help

Link Builder takes your prospects, the sites that are likely to link back to you, and sorts them based on what strategies you might want to use. So we group news sites together, blogs together and so on. This saves you hours of time, but we knew we could go further. So we did.

Let’s say you wanted to target blogs. There are of course millions of blogs out there, and each one will have it’s own niche that you could be targeting. And tags make that easier.

If you were a travel company for example, you might want to speak to fashion bloggers about your Paris deals, or cycling bloggers about your Amsterdam deals. Clearly the same email won’t do for both. With tags, you can just put #cycling or #fashion against the relevant blogs, and they’ll be grouped together. When you’re ready to send the email, just click the tag in the bottom lefthand corner:

And those contacts will be there for you:

How to use tags in Link Builder

Go to the Prospects pages of a campaign.

Check the boxes next to the prospect you want to tag. In this case, we’ll be looking for bloggers.

Then in the notes section, just call the tag whatever you like, with a hashtag (#) before it. In this case, we’re adding the tag #cycling.

Now those sites have been tagged. If you want to view all the sites that you’ve tagged, just click the word at the bottom of the ‘Strategies’ column, and all the sites that you’ve tagged will then show up.

You can then fire off an email to your prospect, tweet them, or post on their Google+ - whatever works for you - and start convincing them why they should link to your site.

There is a whole science behind outreach emails. There actually is. SEO agency iAcquire did a study looking at precisely what makes effective outreach for link building. Our very own Ken McGaffin detailed the 10 reasons why your link requests aren’t working See, I wasn't lying.

Generally, you need to persuade another site to link to you. So make it personal, inject some of your personality, and talk about things on the other webmaster’s site that you loved, and why it’s relevant for them to link to your site. I talked about this in more detail in my article on mentions another new feature of Link Builder So if you’ve not read that already, do.

Don’t tags just make things easier? They are available to use right now in our Link Builder tool, so if you want to create super-targeted link building campaigns super-easily, check them out today!

This is the third in a series of articles on new features in the Link Builder tool. Here are the other two:

How to get great quality links by guest blogging (and how Link Builder makes it easy)
Get low hanging, quality links with Link Builder’s mentions

Try Link Builder free for 7 days

It can be done. There really is a tool for link builders that will help you research and find your best blog prospects, plan your campaigns, and monitor targets.

It’s called Link Builder. You can register now for a free 7 day trial

About Andrew Tobert

Andrew was Wordtracker's Content Manager in 2012. Now he works freelance, helping companies make the most of their websites and social media channels. He's at andrew.tobert@gmail.com if you want to get in touch.