A Roundup of the Top 5 Link Building Plugins

Link Building is the act of obtaining links from other websites with high page rank and/or authority to your own website to improve search engine ranking.

Mozilla Firefox is by far one of the best browsers at present. It’s open source, free and has the option to include literally thousands of plugins. Luckily, some of these plugins are built for Search Engine Optimisation, and I’ve got good things to say about the following:

• Google Toolbar. Amongst its many features, this toolbar will display a live Page Rank of each individual page that you browse. This is useful to know, as sites with a higher Page Rank are more likely to be shown in the top SERP’s. (Search Engine Results Pages)
• SEOmoz Toolbar. This toolbar provides a number of useful metrics about each page. The free version provides both page and domain authority indicators, which can be used to determine whether you’d like a link to your site from that particular page or domain. Generally if a domain has an authority rank over 20 and you successfully gain a link, you will be improving the authority of your own website.
• SEOpen Toolbar: A multitude of tools are provided under various search engine menus. I use the site mainly to check for backlinks to sites quickly, as well as performing whois checks to find contact emails for site owners.
• SEO for Firefox gives each Google search a series of extra data for each listing. Google SERPs include Page Rank, Cache Date, Domain Age, Number of Social Bookmarks, Authoritative Domain In-links and other useful information. By looking through this information, you’ll be able to see why the page ranks where it is.
• Netcraft Toolbar is also a nice addition to this list. Netcraft provides a risk rating metric, as well as the creation date and hosting location. These can be useful for link building because the risk rating will show you whether the domain is associated with phishing or unusual hosting setups which may or may not be safe to use. In either case, it’s usually a bad idea to get a link from a site with a bad rating. Older domains have greater authority, so links from them will carry more authority to your own domain and page.

Download these plugins and look at your search terms, your competitors, and your site to see what metrics you’re achieving. Then, armed with this knowledge, use these tools to find the sites you should look to get links from.

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