5 Link Building Tips To Improve Your Efficiency

Once upon a time I was the oracle of SEO and link building at Netvantage. As we’ve grown we’ve brought in more and more smart people and I’ve been fortunate to learn a lot from my co-workers the past few years. In the past year the thing that has struck me as the biggest thing I could improve upon was decreasing wasted effort in evaluating link prospects and email outreach.

I’ve discovered over time that people that do link building well also do it efficiently. Here are some link building tips I’ve picked up that might help you improve upon your own processes a bit:

top level domain listToss out the irrelevant TLDs

This tip can save you a ton of time. Why flip through a bunch of foreign domains if you’re not looking for those links? Create a column in your link building spreadsheet and find and replace it down to just the TLD and filter out anything you don’t need.

Filter your URLs, titles and descriptions for footprints

If you’ve got a page that’s a resource, then why not limit your results to pages that have “resources” in the URL itself, in the title or in the meta description? If you use a tool like SEOTools for Excel you can pull the meta data for each of the URLs in your list. You’ll filter out a ton of the crap this way and save yourself a ton of time looking at blog posts and old news articles this way. Obviously, there are other qualifiers you can use here, but you get the point.

Nofollows are a no-go

If you’re looking for authority links, why waste your time on nofollow link prospects? When you’re pulling your prospects from a competitive research tool, make sure to filter out the nofollow links if they’re not part of your plan.

Automate (some of) your contact info gathering

Fishing around on-sites for email addresses and contact pages can be a huge drag. Fortunately, there are tools that can automate at least some of this process. I’m a big fan of Scrapebox’s tool which gives you options to crawl individual pages or to a depth of a site looking for email info. Even if it only gets info for 30% of your prospects, that’s a big time saver.

Make sure your prospects aren’t dead

This might seem like a no brainier, but somehow people forget to do this at times. A simple httpstatus check in SEOTools or your tool of choice can knock out a bunch of pages from your prospect list and save you from manually discovering this yourself. Nothing is worse than wanting to punch yourself in the face opening up broken link after broken link by hand.

Now I ask you fair reader, what are your favorite link building tips? 

Adam Henige

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and Moz.

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