This is the third part of our four-part article series on SEO tools. In the last two parts we reviewed keyword research tools, content management systems, image search tools, ranking checkers, analytics tools, social media tools and online copy writing tools. In this third part we list link building tools and statistics tools.
Link Building Tools and Link Analysis Tools
Here’s a list of tools which will assist you in your link building efforts. The most notable are Majestic SEO, LinkScape and Backlink Analyzer. Dig around yourself and do several test searches.
Majestic SEO – Majestic SEO has an index of 52 billion web pages with data on 350 billion links. They have their own crawler, which spiders the web in the same manner as Google and Yahoo, but unlike the major search engines, Majestic SEO shares their link data. When you type “link:domain” into Google, it purposely displays the wrong data, making this command useless. Yahoo Site Explorer is more open, but still limits what you can see.
Majestic SEO lets you see all of the links their crawler found on the web for any domain name. It displays the number of links for free, but to get access to detailed reports you need to purchase credits which cost from £ 2.00 for one credit and up to £ 699.95 for 1000 credits. Payment is with PayPal.
At the moment, from what I learned on their website, Majestic SEO does not differentiate links by quality (except PR), which is a huge factor on Google. The bright side is, one can usually see the quality of the link by looking at the website. Having access to all the links a site has, combined with anchor text, is truly powerful.
LinkScape – LinkScape is similar to Majestic SEO. It maintains an index of 30 billion web pages, and lets webmasters see the anchor text of links, the number of links and other factors, like: mozRank (a copy of page rank), domain level rank, trust rank and more. Read a detailed Linkscape review on SEO Chat.
Back Link Analyzer – This is a free inbound links analyzer tool from SEO Book. It’s downloadable desktop software, so you’ll need to download and install it. Back Link Analyzer gathers data from Yahoo, Google and MSN. You can choose to exclude results from any of those search engines (usually Google, since it’s link data is not real).
The tools is pretty efficient; upon gathering link data from search engines, it extracts the anchor text of each link and shows it in a neat format. Data includes information such as search results, summary, link summary, keyword summary, IP address of the linking page, number of links from the page, linking page title, keywords in page copy, keywords in anchor text, type of domain (.com, .net, etc), pointing page (home, etc), total number of outbound links on the page and more. This is a very useful tool; check it out. Best of all, it’s free.
Yahoo Site Explorer – This is a link analysis tool from Yahoo. Unlike Google, Yahoo shows a large portion of the links of which it’s aware. You can filter results by links to a specific URL, links to a domain, links to a domain/URL excluding internal links. You can also export link data in CSV file. Each link stat shows the page title of the page from which the link is coming, but there’s no anchor text. You have to visit each URL to discover the anchor text.
Search Optimization 
