28 Browser Extensions That Make an SEO’s Life Easier

As an expert SEO, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades.

You need to understand link building, marketing, public relations, psychology, and technology.

At a certain point, there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you’d like to do.

But you can save quite a bit of time and effort on small things by using browser extensions.

You can install them with one or two mouse clicks and access them with ease to the right of your address bar.

They will help you:

• analyze website performance quickly
• examine code behind websites
• build links better
• save time by improving your task efficiency

I’ve put together a list of 28 browser extensions I consider to be the best. I encourage you to give a few of them a try.

A quick heads-up: most of these extensions are for Chrome, but many also have a Firefox version. Only a few of them will work on less popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, or Opera. 

Analyze websites and backlinks with the click of a button

SEOs have to analyze websites constantly.

The extensions in this section will give you a quick glance at the number of backlinks and social shares a page has as well as its basic on-page SEO.

1. Mozbar. Mozbar was the first of its kind. Even though there are now solid alternatives, the Mozbar remains a popular choice among SEOs.

You can use this extension in two main ways.

The first is when you search for a keyword in Google. It will display statistics below each search result:

You can quickly see the page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA) of the pages to assess the competition. You can also use the button beside the Google search bar to get a keyword difficulty score.

The second way in which you can use Mozbar is when you land on a web page. When you click on the Mozbar icon, you’ll see a bar pop up with the page’s overall stats.

Again, it gives you the PA and the DA scores as well as social sharing stats.

You can also dig deeper by clicking the magnifying glass icon on the left side of the bar, which will expand into a new panel.

In the panel, you can see the page’s:

• meta text
• alt text
• headings
• page speed load
• markup
• and more

You can see most of this with a free account, but if you want full access, you will need a PRO account with Moz.

It’s a beautiful and useful extension, but it has lost a lot of its popularity because it relies solely on Open Site Explorer (OSE) data. Compared to other leading link databases, OSE is smaller (contains less data) and updates slower.

2. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar. This is one of Mozbar’s competitors I mentioned. It is made to fulfill much of the same functionality but with data from the superior Ahrefs database instead.

When the bar is active on a page, it’s very thin at the top and shows you both link and social information of that specific URL as well as the overall domain stats.

You’ll find basic information such as:

• backlinks and referring domains
• Ahrefs URL rating and domain rating
• social shares from the main networks
• the same info for the root domain

All basic features are free, but if you have an Ahrefs subscription, you can dig deeper.

When you click the down arrow in the top left corner, a panel with more information will expand. You’ll be able to see a graph for the recent backlink growth (or decline) to the page or domain. There is also a handy link to go to the actual Ahrefs site explorer if you’d like to take a closer look.

Finally, you can also activate the plugin when you search for something on Google. You’ll get a small information-packed bar under each URL:

It shows linking and social data for both the URL and domain.

3. Majestic SEO Toolbar. This is the other main competitor of Mozbar. Again, it has all the essential features of an SEO toolbar.

When you activate it on a web page, you can see the:

• number of links
• number of root domains
• trust flow and citation flow
• link profile chart
• and more

All the information is drawn from the Majestic SEO database, of course. The information in the main “summary” tab is free. If you’d like to use the other tabs, such as the detailed backlink analysis or anchor text, you’ll need a paid account.

The only potential problem is that, unlike the other SEO extensions here, it does not analyze search results. So if you’re looking for a quick keyword competitor analysis, one of the other tools might be a better option.

4. SEO & Website Analysis by WooRank. This plugin is one of the best all-in-one SEO plugins. The three extensions we’ve looked at so far all focused on backlinks and page authority, but this extension is more focused on on-page SEO and technical aspects.

Click its icon while you’re on a page, and a panel will pop out of the left side. Let it run for about 20-30 seconds (depends on the page):

The first thing you’ll notice is an overall score out of 100. This indicates how many of the basic best practices the page follows.

The real power of this extension is in the small tabs along the top. Each tab will give you different information about the page and site:

• basic SEO: title tags and meta information
• mobile optimization: a mobile friendly score and previews on different devices
• usability: page load metrics and how easy it is to access content
• technology: what plugins and CMS are being used
• social: basic social sharing statistics
• visitors: estimate of traffic level

The great thing about this toolbar is that almost all of this information is free. There are a few advanced options that require a premium account.

5. Check My Links. If you ever do broken link building, you need this extension.

When you’re on a page, just click the extension icon, and it’ll quickly test all the links to see if they’re working.

Working links are highlighted in green, while the broken ones will be highlighted in red with the error code beside them.

The only thing that could be improved here is having a shortcut to quickly copy the URLs and anchor text of the broken links, which could then be pasted into an email or spreadsheet. Still, this is the best broken link checker I’ve used.

6. Domain Hunter Plus. This extension can also be used to identify broken links. However, it was made for a very specific purpose: to find expired domains that already have backlinks and authority.

It’s very simple to use. Go to a high authority page with a lot of links, and click on the extension’s icon to scan the page. It will find all the broken links on the page and show them to you in its little panel.

The cool thing is that it also shows you how many links are pointing to the broken URL as well as how many links point to the domain. Finally, it shows you if the domain is available to register.

If you’re looking to pick up a cheap domain that already has some decent authority, spend a few hours with Google and this extension, and you can probably find what you’re looking for.

7. SEO Quake. Some SEOs don’t want an extension associated with a premium link tool or need something a little more customizable.

SEO Quake is a little more basic than other extensions, but it still gives you the essentials. It’s also one of the few available for all major browsers (including Opera and Safari).

It is designed, just like Mozbar and Ahrefs, to work with search engine result pages (SERPs). With it, when you search for something on Google, you’ll get a bar beneath each result.

It gives you quick estimates of the number of links to the page and domain, page age, alexa rank, and links to whois info. One really cool feature is the ability to save the SERP data and results as a CSV file (spreadsheet).

When you use the extension on a web page (other than a search engine), it will open up a new tab with the results. It’s not pretty, but it does contain:

• basic meta information
• basic social shares
• keyword density
• backlink information

Be aware that the link data comes from publicly reported Google and Bing/Yahoo links, which aren’t necessarily the most up-to-date or accurate.

Finally, I mentioned that you could customize this extension. It’s possible to add your own parameters if you need non-standard metrics and are not afraid to learn a bit about regular expressions.

8. Meta SEO Inspector. This extension is extremely basic but clearly shows you the meta information of a page. When you click the icon, you’ll get something like this:

The information includes the basic meta tags (title, description, keywords) and open graph tags (important for social media), and it highlights if any important ones are missing.

Most SEOs won’t need this very often, but it might be nice to have if you find yourself needing to find and copy down meta information once in a while.

9. NoDofollow (Firefox) or NoFollow (Chrome). These two extensions aren’t made by the same creator, but they are the leading options for this function for the corresponding browsers. As their names suggest, when the extensions are active, they identify all links as “dofollow” or “nofollow.”

With NoDofollow (pictured above), the good links (dofollow) are highlighted in blue, while nofollow links are highlighted in red.

There may be some value in having nofollow links in your link profile, but typically you want to focus your effort and resources on obtaining high quality dofollow links.

Here is when these tools would be useful: (1) when you’re trying to decide if you should comment on a site or (2) if you’re wondering if links from a new social media site have any SEO value. A quick click of the button gives you an easy answer.

Extract useful information from the web

When it comes to SEO research, most is done on the web. Instead of wasting your time doing everything manually, use the extensions in this section to speed things up.

10. Scraper. If you’re an SEO, chances are that you need to copy down links and written content from pages on a fairly regular basis. Scraper is designed to work on most pages.

When you come across a chart or table you’d like to scrape, you can highlight a few cells/rows and then right-click on the selection and choose “scrape similar.” The tool will find data in the rest of the table, giving you the ability to open it as a spreadsheet.

Watch this short video to see how it works:

One final note about Scraper is that it isn’t going to work 100% of the time. It’s designed to be lightweight and intuitive, which means that it sacrifices the complexity to make it robust enough to handle all situations.

That being said, I think you’ll find it useful in a large percentage of the situations that need a quick scrape.

11. Link Grabber. The first thing you’ll notice about Link Grabber is that it’s extremely fast. When you have a web page open and click the icon, a new tab will open almost immediately with a complete list of links.

These links are clickable, and you could also copy/paste them into a spreadsheet:

Unfortunately, there’s no option to see only external links. If you’d like to only see those, right-click the icon and click on options. Then, you can add the domain you’re on to the blocked domains list so that it won’t show up. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it will work in a pinch.

This plugin is useful if you’re trying to quickly collect a list of sites that a particular domain links to. You can analyze the results together in a spreadsheet to find the most popular linked-to sites and see if you can devise a strategy to get links too.

Additionally, sometimes you just need a quick link count or want to examine the internal linking of a site.

Find out what lies beneath the surface of a web page

Remember that Google doesn’t see what we see when we’re surfing the web—its bots see code. Not all code is visible on a web page itself. SEOs need to be able understand the basics of HTML, CSS, and even Javascript.

These extensions will help you find out what’s behind a particular page.

12. Firebug. This extension is a must for any SEO or developer using Firefox. It allows you to right-click on an element of a page to see its HTML and CSS.

Additionally, you can edit the HTML/CSS to see what the page would look like with different parameters. Developers can use Firebug to debug websites, but SEOs typically don’t need to worry about that.

There’s no way I can show you all the features of the tool in this post, so watch this quick video if this sounds like something you could use:

Chrome has a pretty great built-in code inspector already. However, if you like Firebug on Firefox, there’s also a lite version of it for Chrome. It can do almost everything the Firefox version can minus Javascript debugging and a few other features.

13. User Agent Switcher. Your website’s visitors use all sorts of browsers, devices, and software. In many cases, certain visitors have trouble seeing your website as intended.

If you’re a smart SEO, you’ll dig into your analytics every once in a while to see if a certain subset of users has abnormally poor user metrics (high bounce rate, low time on page, etc.).

Unless you own 20 different phones, laptops, and tablets, it isn’t easy to investigate the issue.

With this extension, you can set your browser to tell any website that it’s a specific browser, device, or operating system. You can even pretend to be a search engine spider.

So when you have a problem with low conversion or poor engagement, you can find the cause and then use User Agent Switcher to confirm that you’ve fixed the issue.

14. Browsec. Depending on the sites you work on, your site may display different content to users in different countries. Alternatively, you may want to access some content that you can’t from your country’s IP address.

Browsec is a simple free VPN that allows you to spoof your IP address and makes websites think you’re located somewhere else. The free version of Browsec has a limited set of options but good enough for most situations:

15. Wappalyzer. I love finding a new tool that helps improve conversion rate or engagement before it gets too popular. One of the best sources of new tools is other websites you frequently visit.

If you visit a website one day and see a new plugin, widget, or other feature that you love, chances are that it’s a WordPress plugin. Sometimes there will be a label on it, but not always.

You can use Wappalyzer to find a ton of information about a website, including:

• widgets being used
• the operating system
• any special fonts
• web server information
• frameworks

Just click the extension icon, and you’ll get a list within seconds.

16. Page load time. Having a fast-loading website is essential not just for search engine rankings but also for marketing in general. If your visitors can’t load a page quickly, more often than not, they’ll leave.

This extension is very simple. It shows how long it took you to load a page in your browser toolbar.

You can expand the results to see a more detailed breakdown:

You can see if any redirects are taking too long to load or if your server response time is too long, among other things. You can use this to see if you need a content delivery network (CDN) or a faster host.

17. Redirect Path Checker. Redirects are an important part of the Internet. As pages and sites get updated or transfer ownership, redirects can ensure that backlink authority is passed through and that visitors can still find you.

This extension will show you all the redirects from the URL you entered to your final URL:

This simple extension can come in handy in a number of ways.

For example, if you’re analyzing your competition, it’s important that you know exactly what you’re up against. You can search for a page in Google and filter out all new results so that any links to that page from these results link to the original URL (if it’s different from the present one).

You can then use the plugin to follow the redirect chain and then find all the backlinks pointing to each URL along the way.

Additionally, you can use this to find any redirect problems you’re having with your own site.

18. Ghostery. This extension tracks all scripts on a page and shows them to you in an attractive little pop-out panel (when clicked).

First, this tells you which widgets, plugins, and other scripts (like advertising networks) are being used on the page.

Additionally, you can block any of these scripts with the click of a button. If you’re running a lot of scripts on your website, this tool can let you test the effect they have on page speed as well as the appearance of your website to visitors.

Stay up-to-date with minimal effort

Many parts of your job as an SEO require you to stay up-to-date. Whether it’s information about SEO, your niche, or social media activities, there are extensions that can help.

I’ve collected them here for you.

19. Mozcast. Here’s another extension from Moz. It quickly shows you what the current Mozcast is in a little bubble on your browser’s toolbar. This can alert you to any big shifts in the SERPs so that you can look into any issues.

If you visit the Mozcast website regularly, you may prefer to use this extension instead to save time. When you click it, a pop-out will show you a graph of the temperatures for the last 30 days.

20. Buffer. Buffer is an amazing tool for scheduling social media sharing. You can set it to share a certain number of posts per day at specific times automatically.

This extension allows you to add posts to share to your personal queue. Instead of having to go back to the main Buffer site, you can just click this extension icon when you come across something worth sharing and add it to your queue:

The share will automatically be populated with your current URL and its title, but you can change it if you need to.

Another great feature of this plugin is that it adds a little Share Image button to the bottom right of all pictures.

Including images in social media shares typically increases your engagement rate. When you click this button, it brings up the same pop-up as before, but it also includes the image you picked.

21. Pocket. In a field such as SEO, you always have to stay up-to-date if you want to be seen as competent. That means you have to read a ton of content on a regular basis.

Pocket allows you to save articles, images, and videos for later. By using this extension, you can quickly “put content into your pocket.”

Note that you can install Pocket on just about any operating system or device. That means you can save content from your computer and read it later on your mobile device when you have free time.

Be a more efficient and effective SEO

Who doesn’t want to free up some time?

These extensions will help you complete common SEO tasks faster and better.

22. Evernote Web Clipper. Evernote is primarily a note-taking software, but it has since become well known for its image editing software Skitch. Skitch lets you quickly annotate images, and it’s a tool I often use to annotate images for blog posts.

This web clipper extension is essentially Skitch for your browser. You can select a full screenshot, an email, or a full page of content or select a specific part of a webpage.

It will open your selection in a new tab and let you edit it before saving it to your Evernote account:

While there are only a few options for editing and annotating, it’s all you need 95% of the time.

23. TechSmith Snagit. If you’re not a fan of Evernote for some reason, no worries—I have you covered.

Snagit is a very similar tool, and in some ways, it’s even a bit better (and a bit worse in others).

I use it sometimes to create images for blog posts, so I don’t think you can go wrong with either option. Snagit is often a bit quicker just because you can download an image directly after editing it instead of going to your notebook and downloading it.

Once you make your selection, it will appear in a new tab so that you can edit it:

It has a few different options when it comes to shape and color, but it doesn’t have the advanced tools such as the marker, blurring, or highlighting.

24. Bit.ly. A big part of your job as an SEO revolves around links. Bit.ly is arguably the most popular link shortener service. It lets you shorten URLs quickly, and it even lets you track stats such as the number of clicks a link got.

Another cool feature is that if you enter a URL to shorten it, if someone has already done it with Bit.ly, you can see how many people clicked it in the past.

When you click this extension icon, it will automatically give you a shortened URL to use. You can also share it directly from the pop-up with your social profiles:

25. LastPass. How many accounts do you have on different websites? For most SEOs, it’s a ridiculous number.

Instead of having messy and unsecured spreadsheets or text files of user names and passwords, you can use LastPass.

It lets you save user names, passwords, and notes for any site you visit, and it will automatically fill them in (securely) when you come back in the future.

Instead of trying to remember 1,394,293 (or however many) passwords, you only need to remember one password for your LastPass account. You can access your data from any computer/device.

Here’s a brief overview of the free tool:

I only talked about convenience, but this is good for security too. You won’t need to reuse passwords since you can create a strong unique password for every account you own.

26. Momentum. If you find yourself getting off track during the day, Momentum could be a useful extension for you. It works by creating a custom “new tab” screen that you see every time you open a new tab.

First and foremost, Momentum shows you your main goal for the day. It also lets you create a handy to-do list.

In addition, the backgrounds are gorgeous, and you can see your local weather as well.

It’s a nifty little tool to brighten up your day and keep you focused.

27. ShareMetric. If you don’t want to use a full SEO bar like I showed you earlier but you still need to know how a specific page has performed on social media, you can use this extension.

When you click the icon, this tool will show you any page’s stats for all major social networks:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Pinterest

In addition, it shows you some basic SEO stats. It includes both Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs stats for URL and domain rank as well as linking root domains to the page.

28. iMacros. Automation is a powerful thing. It’s how blackhat and greyhat SEOs dominated search engine results for years. Now that Google has caught up, automated link building has died out for the most part. However, that doesn’t mean that automation can’t help you in other aspects of SEO.

If you’re doing anything on a daily or weekly basis and it’s the exact same procedure every time, it can be automated.

The power of automation is that even if it’s a small task, saving a few minutes on a regular basis will save you hours of time by the end of the year.

iMacros features full-fledged paid versions, but its extensions are free and good enough for most basic SEO tasks.

Here’s an overview of how the iMacros extension works:

Yes, this is a fairly technical thing to learn, but it’s worth it in the long run. Plus, most SEOs that I’ve talked to find it kind of fun.

If you want to start learning about automating tasks with iMacros, start with this tutorial.

Conclusion

I’ve shown you 28 browser extensions that can make any SEO’s life easier.

I doubt you need them all, but I hope you found at least a few extensions that will help you in the future.

While many of them have a learning curve, I recommend trying them out for a week at a time to find out which ones are really useful to you.

I know that I’ve probably missed some great extensions—don’t yell at me! Instead, leave me a comment below and let me know which extension(s) is your favorite.

Don’t Get Left Behind: The 8 Most Effective Link Building Tactics For 2015

Do you ever wonder if you’re wasting your time building links?

Google has aggressively looked for ways to devalue links in its algorithms for quite a while. At first, you could just hop on to the next link-building tactic, but now, Google has a pretty good handle on how to factor links into its algorithm.

That being said, backlinks are still a very important ranking factor… just look at the image above. 

It’s always good to get more quality backlinks—the ones that are natural because you have content worth linking to. You can build these backlinks using a few tactics.

Some SEOs engage in risky blackhat tactics, but unless you can operate on a large scale and are fine with getting penalized later on, it’s not particularly profitable.

The other main strategy is to earn backlinks by creating great content and getting it in front of the right people.

Although there haven’t been any new tactics for link building in a while, some proved to more effective than others in 2015. Plus, you can always find ways to improve each of the tactics.

What I’m about to show you are the 8 most effective link building tactics that work well right now as well as ways to implement them better than, or at least as well as, anyone else.

The mindset of link building in 2015

I’m warning you upfront:

Most of these tactics require having great content. I’m not talking about the articles you can get from Fiverr for $5. I’m talking about well-written articles and other well-designed content made by experts, whether that’s you or someone you hire.

Here’s the thing: You either spend the money on content, or you spend it on backlinks.

You can get great backlinks without great content, but you will have to pay a lot for them. We’re talking at least $100 per link. Since Google is getting better at recognizing on-page quality, this approach has limited effectiveness.

Instead, spend the money on great content. Eventually, that will earn you long-term, consistent traffic that will more than pay you back if monetized properly. Think of content creation as an investment.

Here is what I generally consider great content to be:

• in-depth guides written by subject experts
• professionally designed infographics
• useful tools for your audience or peers
• professionally filmed videos

Once you have that content, you can start using the tactics I’m about to show you to get great links for relatively cheap (or free if you don’t count your time).

Here’s why these tactics are the best: As you might know, getting great rankings takes time—it’s a long-term goal. But with most of the tactics in this post, you can get links that send you traffic right away. Always try to get links that will not only help your search authority but will also send you traffic that can be turned into subscribers.

1. Steal your competitors’ links

If you publish top-notch stuff for a while, you’ll get a few natural backlinks here and there.

When you see those links, you’ll think to yourself: “I wish I knew sooner that I could get a link from this site.”

It’s easy to find those obvious link targets, but it’s often hard to find other sites that could link to you. Although the web has about 1 trillion websites, you’ll never hear about most of them.

What this tactic entails is actively monitoring the new backlinks that your close competitors get and then seeing if there’s a way that you can get a similar backlink as well.

Here’s how you do it…

Step 1 – Find close competitors: Notice that I emphasized close. The more similar your sites are when it comes to subjects covered, the more effective this tactic will be.

Why? Imagine you run a blog about conversion rate optimization. Technically, Quick Sprout might be a competitor because I occasionally write about split testing and other optimization tactics.

However, if you monitored Quick Sprout’s new backlinks every day, very few links would be relevant to your site.

Instead, you want to find a really close competitor whose backlinks are very relevant to you and worth trying to get.

To find those blogs, we’ll use Google, but you have to be really specific. Search for “best [specific niche] blogs.” This should bring up a few lists of popular blogs, which is what we want.

For this example blog, we want to find other conversion rate optimization blogs:

Look for lists that are pretty recent; otherwise, you might find that blogs that once had a very specific focus have since become more general authority sites.

After looking through the first few lists, we can identify at least five close competitors. For example:

• Crazyegg
• ConversionXL
• Unbounce

Write these down somewhere so you don’t forget them.

Step 2 – Spy on your competitors: Once you have a list of competitors, start by searching for the first one on Ahrefs or Majestic. Here’s what it looks like on Ahrefs:

On the top menu, navigate to: “Inbound links > New”. This will show you the newest backlinks that point to your competitor.

By default, it should show you links from the last seven days, but if your competitor gets a ton of links on a regular basis, you may want to do this daily. Besides, free plans can show you only a few results at a time, so checking every day will let you see more of the backlinks.

Next, start visiting the sites that provide the backlinks. Just click on the blue URL:

Find the link on the page, and figure out why the author included it:

In this case, it’s a quote by a Crazy Egg blog author about using the Buzz Sumo tool to find new content ideas.

You’ll need to repeat this for each link in the report, and then do the same thing for each competitor.

Step 3 – Find a way to get those links: This is where you’ll need to practice because it’s not easy to figure out how you can get a similar link.

In this case, I can reasonably assume that if the author is using a quote there, it means that coming up with popular content ideas isn’t her area of expertise.

From here, there are a few ways that I could approach it:

1. Pitch a guest post on that topic (e.g., “X Ways to Come Up With Content Ideas That Are Guaranteed Winners”).
2. Introduce myself as a conversion rate expert and offer to provide a quote about content ideation or any other relevant topic in the future.
3. Come up with a clever spin on using Buzz Sumo for content ideas and send it to the author so that she can quote it and include a link to my site. Additionally, I could write a short tutorial on it that she could just link to.

Every link is different, and there are different ways to approach it.

In general, you need to figure out why the author linked to your competitor’s piece: what value did your competitor provide to the linker?

Figure that out, and then try to provide value in a similar way. It won’t always pay off, but if you get really good at this, you can have upwards of a 10% success rate.

Step 4 – Monitor in the future: This is a never-ending tactic, which is a great thing. If you can get just one or two links doing this an hour or two a day, you’ll have 360-720 really high quality links in a year. If you get this many, you will be getting some significant search traffic.

2. Stand out among the crowd with the Skyscraper Technique

I mention Brian Dean and his site Backlinko all the time. He’s best known for his Skyscraper Technique.

He’s written quite a few case studies of his readers getting great results from it. One reader got several backlinks along with 36,282 visitors and 1,000 subscribers. Another reader was able to drive 17,584 unique visitors to a brand new website in one day.

The basic idea is to create the best piece of content by far for a particular subject. Then, reach out to people who have linked to inferior content and ask them to add a link to yours.

Here’s how it works…

Step 1 – Pick a keyword and research the SERPs: First and foremost, this technique is for you to get some high authority links. The traffic is just a bonus.

In order for this to work well, you need to pick a keyword with a decent search volume (at least 1,000 searches per month). You’ll see why this is important soon.

You’re free to use any keyword research tool you’d like, but I’ll use the Adwords Keyword Planner for this example. Start by searching for your main niche:

You’ll get a list of relevant keywords. Next, filter out any results with fewer than 1,000 searches per month:

Now that we have a list of keywords with a decent search volume, we can look for a good keyword to target with our content.

This isn’t the greatest list. Some keywords are too general (e.g., “search engine optimization”), while others are too specific (e.g., for a certain product).

One possibility is “search engine optimization tips.” This is related to conversion optimization but only loosely. So I would keep trying other search terms in the tool to find a better keyword.

Next, I inserted “split testing” into the tool and found that “AB testing” had 4,400 searches per month. That’s a good keyword to target.

Next, go to Google (in incognito or private browsing), and search for your keyword. Start looking through the results to see what you’re up against:

Don’t get put off if you see content from extremely authoritative domains ranking highly. Remember, the goal of this technique is to get backlinks. You may rank for your target term, but you may not. You can still get traffic and rankings for long-tail searches, and the links will help your other content as well.

Step 2 – Create the best piece of content ever: There are many ways to improve content. You can make it longer, more in-depth, more trusted, better looking, or improve some other aspect of it.

It’s important that you improve upon the content in the first few search results not by a bit, but by a lot.

You want to be able to reach out to site owners and say that linking to your guide will improve their articles or resource pages a lot.

Here are some great guides to producing exceptional content:

• The Neil Patel Method To Getting Great Blog Content
• 22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue [Infographic]
• How To Create Better Content For Your Customers
• The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content

Step 3 – Use email outreach to “steal” links: Once you have your content, it’s time for an email outreach campaign. You can do this yourself or hire a virtual assistant to do it for you.

First, you need a list of competitors. Use Scrapebox or this online tool to scrape the Google results for your target keyword:

Copy the results into a spreadsheet. Next, you’ll have to run the URLs through Ahrefs or Majestic. Then remove those that have fewer than five links.

Once you do that, you’ll have to get the full backlink profile of each URL:

Export the list of backlinks, and add a new sheet for each URL’s backlink profile.

Finally, you need to visit each of these pages that link to your competitors’ pages, and send them an email asking them to include a link to your page. Brian has outreach templates you can use.

As you can see, this is not an easy technique. It will take at least 20-30 hours of work. However, you should be able to get a good level of traffic and, more importantly, 20+ great backlinks.

3. Truly remarkable infographics still awe audiences

Using infographics to get backlinks is a strategy that has been around for years. It was one of the main strategies I used to build both the KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout blogs.

However, as more and more people recognized the potential of infographics, the results started to diminish. I still think they are a valuable tactic even if they aren’t as effective as they used to be.

Since 2012, my infographics have driven over 21,000 visitors and over 370 backlinks from 34 unique linking domains.

If you pay a designer to create your infographic (which I recommend), it will cost you somewhere from $250 to $595 per infographic, depending on the designer and the size of infographic. This works out to $7.3-17.5 per linking root domain (about a tenth of that per backlink).

Here is my complete guide to creating a popular infographic.

In addition to the sites in that guide that you can submit your infographic to, here is a list of another 20 (some duplicates).

Start with what’s in that guide, but there’s one promotional tactic you can use to take your efforts even further.

The basic idea is to find infographics that your competitors have made in the past and see who republished them and linked to them.

Google “[competitor] + infographic”:

Alternatively, you can perform the search in Google images.

You will see that the infographics are either:

1. shared by your competitor (someone else’s infographic) or
2. created by your comptetitor.

For the most part, just ignore the first one unless it’s highly relevant to your niche. If it is, record the original URL of the infographic.

Keep going through the results until you have a giant list of infographic URLs that are highly relevant to your blog. Then, repeat it for each competitor.

Afterwards, plug your URL into a backlink analysis tool, and inspect the backlinks:

Vsit all the URLs that are linking to the infographic’s page:

On each website, try to find a contact email. It’s likely that if a site has shared a conversion optimization infographic in the past, it will do it again in the future.

Email the contact person with the template from my guide (or your own), asking them to take a look at your infographic. Remember, if you leave a few comments on that site or share a few of its posts first, your odds of success will be higher.

4. Strap on a mic and get interviewed

Speaking is not for everyone—I get that. But if you’re comfortable being interviewed on a podcast, you can get some solid links that cost nothing other than your time.

If you have a great reputation in your niche already, you probably get podcast interview requests fairly often.

But if you don’t have that level of popularity yet, don’t worry—it can still be done. The only difference is that it will take some extra effort on your part.

Instead of targeting really popular podcasts, we’re going to target podcasts of a low-medium popularity. They have a much harder time getting good guests, and if they’re new, there’s a good chance that they will grow as they continue the show. This could lead to a win-win relationship with the podcaster.

At this point you might be thinking: “How does this get me links?”

When a podcaster does a show, they almost always have a website where they post show notes. They post links to the resources mentioned in the episode. You can send 4-5 links to the content on your site to the podcaster after the interview, and almost all of them will be happy to add them to the show notes.

Step 1 – Search for general niche terms: Unfortunately, I’ve yet to find a really good podcast search engine.

Until there is one, you can either go straight to iTunes or use Podbay.fm.

Search for any niche where you think you would be a valuable guest. For example, I would search for “marketing,” “SEO,” “entrepreneur,” “business,” etc.

You’ll get a list of podcasts that are focused on that topic:

Step 2 – Identify suitable targets: This is the problem with not having a better search engine. There’s no way for you to easily find a suitable podcast.

Instead, you will have to record the name of each show from each search result in a spreadsheet. Yes, I know, this is tedious, so outsource it to a virtual assistant if you don’t want to do it yourself.

When you “view” a podcast on podcast.fm, you can click on “Stats” to find out the podcast’s popularity.

Create a column in your spreadsheet for the “TrueRank” of each podcast:

The rank is a measure of how popular a show is, where lower is better.

Step 3 – Work your way up: Unless you’re well-known elsewhere, you can’t start with the most popular podcasts.

Order your spreadsheet by the podcasts’ rankings: from the highest TrueRank (the least popular) to the lowest (the most popular). Target the first 5-10 least popular shows before moving to the next ones.

If you really want to boost your chances of a successful pitch, leave a 5-star review for the show on iTunes. The podcaster will greatly appreciate it.

Then, find their email from their website, and send them a pitch like this:

Subject: (Name of podcast)

Hi [name],

I freaking love your podcast! I only discovered it yesterday and wish I did sooner. Not sure why you guys aren’t ranked higher in iTunes.

Anyways, I left you a glowing 5 star review, so hopefully that will help you get a little more exposure.

I actually gave podcasting a go before, and it was a blast, but decided to pursue other business opportunities.

I’m not sure if you’re looking for guests for the show, but I’d love to come on for an episode if you are.

I’m a [profession or business description]. For your show, I think we could have a great discussion about [related topic]. In particular, we could talk about how I [past impressive achievement].

Keep up the great work!

Warm regards,

[your name]

In order to write your pitch well, you will have to give the show a quick listen. See if they have standardized questions as well as what topics they prefer to talk about (although you can usually see those from titles/descriptions).

Once you’ve done a few shows, move on to the next set of shows. Do the same pitch, but add a line in the middle of the email that says: “I’ve recently done interviews on (Podcast #1), (Podcast #2), and (Podcast #3).”

Although this is time consuming, and part of a long-term strategy, it can pay off with some solid links and an opportunity to connect with influencers in your niche.

5. Actively target link roundups for links and authority

Link roundups are an underused source of links at the moment.

I’ll show you how to find roundups in your niche and get included in them.

In case you’re not familiar with link roundups, let me explain. They are a collection of links of the best new resources in a niche. Typically, the creators of these roundups publish them once a week or once a month on their blogs.

They are used in almost every niche, which makes this an incredibly versatile and useful tactic.

Here’s how you do it…

Step 1 – Find link roundups: To find roundups, search Google for:

“intitle:roundup” + [your niche]

You should be able to find at least a dozen within the first five pages or so of the results. The best ones are weekly and monthly roundups, which could lead to ongoing links if you develop a relationship with the creator.

In this case, I used content marketing as a pretty specific niche. But you could also look for general “internet marketing” roundups or for related roundups in SEO or inbound marketing. As long as you think the roundup will contain links to articles in your niche, it’s fine.

There’s no limit to how many you can record on a spreadsheet: the more the better. Ideally, get at least 15-20. Some niches will have more than others.

Step 2 – Establish contact with the authors: Roundup creators spend a lot of time finding good resources to include. If you can bring them good content (yours), it’s a win-win.

Cold emails can be fairly effective, but you can take your results to the next level by establishing content first.

The problem with cold emails, even in a win-win situation, is that the roundup creator will assume that you’re doing this just to get a link. That means you probably don’t care about their roundup much or its level of quality. Some won’t mind, but some will.

The alternative plan is to comment on a few roundups (new ones), share the roundups and other content, and then ask for yours to be included.

Remember why roundup authors create roundups:

• to get social shares
• to attract backlinks
• to attract engagement (comments)
• to begin relationships

Monitor the list of roundups you have over the next month, and make sure to comment on the next one. Also share it on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever social platform is most appropriate, and make sure to tag the creators in it.

Step 3 – Reach out: Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, you can finally reach out and ask to be included. In many cases, once you comment on and share previous roundups, the creators will check out your website and even include some of your posts.

Either way, here’s a template you can use if you need to reach out:

Subject: Weekly roundup on [site]

Hi [name],

I stumbled across your weekly roundups a short while ago and love how much effort you put into including only the best posts of the week. I know that must take a ton of time.

I hope it’s not too forward, but I just published an epic post that I think would be great for a future roundup. It’s a [length] word guide on [topic] that is incredibly detailed and actionable.

Can I send you a link to the post?

Best Regards,

[my name]

If the person you are emailing says yes, just send your link. If you don’t get a response after a week or so, send a quick follow-up email with a similar message.

Since you’ve commented and shared past roundups, the creator will likely know that you’re willing to help out if you get included, which will improve your chances of a positive response.

Once you do get included in a roundup, make sure to leave a comment on it and share it wherever possible. Then, send another email like this:

Subject: Just wanted to say thanks

Hi [name],

I really appreciate being included in your roundup this (week/month). I’m a little biased, but I think it’s one of your best yet ;).

If there’s anything you need help with, just shoot me an email. I’ve checked out the rest of your work, and I love it. If you ever need a link/share, I’d happy to help.

Thanks,

[your name]

The final piece of the puzzle is to wait a while (at least 2-3) roundups, and then ask them to include your next epic piece of content. You will have a very high success rate this time.

Since you can’t constantly pester one person, it’s good to find as many roundups as possible so that you can get a continuous stream of links.

6. Create a useful tool for your community

When we talk about content, we usually talk about text, audio, or video.

But I think you can consider a tool a type of content as well.

I’m talking about a tool that your readers and colleagues can use: something like Quick Sprout (big) or something like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer (small). Either way, you can get some great links that work out to $2-20/link once you factor in the cost of the tool, which is fantastic.

Option #1 – Create a small tool: You take on much less risk with a small tool. If you spend a few hundred dollars and for some reason it doesn’t do well, it’s not too big of a deal. If you spend thousands, then it starts to matter a lot.

Here are some examples of tools:

• Keywordtool.io: A keyword research tool. Estimated cost – $4,800. Linking root domains – 2,400. Cost per linking root domain: $2.00
• FaqFox: A simple market research tool. Estimated cost – $200. Linking root domains – 83.00 Cost per linking root domain: $2.41
• The Content Ideator: A content ideation tool. Estimated cost – $2,400. Cost per linking root domain: $20.69

Depending on the tool you pick, you have some wiggle room in the price. I can think of many tools that could be made for just a few hundred dollars.

The main reasons you would create a small tool is to get backlinks and traffic.

Option #2 – Create a powerful tool: Alternatively, if you see the opportunity to solve a big problem with a tool, you can take it. That’s what I did with the Quick Sprout website analyzer.

I’ve previously blogged about the cost and return on an investment like that. It cost over $45,000 at first to build (~$100,000 for the final version), but I figure that it brings in about $60,000 per month.

The exact URL for the tool has 625 referring domains (and the number will only grow). This works out to $160 per linking root domain. That’s about what you pay per link when you hire an SEO agency. The difference is that this tool brings in a ton of business on a regular basis.

If you decide to create a powerful tool like this, the links can be part of the reason, but the primary objective should be to build your business (feed it leads).

I highly recommend making a free and a paid version of your tool. Not doing so was one of the biggest mistakes I made with Crazy Egg.

7. Make authoritative businesses love you with detailed reviews and testimonials

Do you know what the #1 objective of most businesses is?

It’s to make money.

If you can help them do that, they will love you.

Here’s what you do: Make a list of all the products you use to run your blog or business that you genuinely like.

Then, fill in the blanks in this sentence:

“(Product name) has helped my business (achievement).”

This is what businesses are looking for. They want to show testimonials and case studies from businesses who have actually accomplished something with their product.

Then, get in touch with the company (marketing director if possible) and offer to provide a testimonial. Include that sentence from above. You need to show that you have some data to back up your claims.

Additionally, offer any other data you have, or offer to do a video review as well.

If you have something to offer, there’s a good chance you can get a solid link from an authoritative domain such as this:

Not all companies have a testimonial page. You can still offer to give one—they can use it in blog posts or on various sales pages. Just mention that you’d appreciate a link with it when it makes sense.

8. Guest blogging isn’t what it used to be…

Guest blogging for SEO has been all the rage for a few years up until a little while ago when Matt Cutts declared that guest blogging was dead.

That’s an exaggeration, but I think the way that many people guest-posted is indeed dead.

If you’re just posting on low traffic low authority blogs that are desperate for content, the ones you’ll find on services such as MyBlogGuest, you are not going to accomplish much.

Instead, you need to focus on getting guest opportunities on leading authority sites in your general niche.

First, however, you need to realize that this isn’t all about SEO. If you’re putting all the work into getting an opportunity and creating great content for a guest post, the one or two links you get is not enough to justify the effort.

The main benefit you get is traffic and increased exposure/authority from appearing on a leading blog.

I’ve written many times about how to do guest-posting effectively:

• Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
• How to Find the Best Places to Guest Blog
• Advanced Guest Posting
• 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts

The final tip I’d like to give you on how to improve your guest-posting from a link-building perspective is this: contextual links (links in the article) get more value than links in a bio box.

Most site owners won’t be happy if you stuff your guest post with links to your site. However, it’s usually fine to add one or two—when appropriate—in the article text itself as long as you are including links to other authoritative sources as well.

Conclusion

Link building is still a vital part of SEO and site growth. You shouldn’t spend all your time on building links, but you should be spending a large chunk of it on a regular basis.

In 2015, effective link building tactics revolve around creating exceptional content and then getting people with access to high authority sites to see it.

It’s up to you to decide which of these tactics you’d like to focus on. It’s a good thing to have a diverse link profile, which means that you should try at least a few of these tactics.

If you have any questions about the tactics I’ve given you here or have experience with any of them, please leave a comment below.