Product Review of Link Research Tools Link Building Toolkit

Links are the bread and butter of SEO. A major contributing factor to the search engines’ algorithms, links help build a site’s trust factor, drive targeted traffic and increase brand presence online. Developing and implementing a diverse link building campaign is one of the most important factors contributing to overall SEO success, but it is not an easy task. One of the most complex tasks associated with link building is identifying and organizing the inbound links your site has, as well as discovering new places to get a quality link. The Link Research Tools (LRT) Research Center has 10 different link data tools for users, making it one of the most comprehensive link building toolkits available. Their tools uncover more data about your backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks than you ever could alone.
Here is a look at 5 of the 10 tools in the Link Research Tools Research Center:

Backlink Profiler
The Backlink Profiler crawls the anchor text and link status for each link, as well as more than 50 different metrics that help you determine the quality of your backlinks. This is very useful in a link building campaign, as search engines place more value on the quality of a link, not the quantity. One of the really great features of the Backlink Profiler is its “Dropped Link” handling. Every link in the report is checked, and non-existent links are identified, giving you the chance to reactive them.
Here is a screenshot of a Backlink Profiler report I ran on Brick Marketing:
One of the great things about this report is that is shows you what anchor text the backlink used. Search engines like to see a diverse and natural link portfolio. Having various anchor texts associated with the same URL keeps your site from being flagged as spammer. The very last column (not pictured) tells you what kind of site the backlink is from, i.e. blog, web directory, article directory, social, etc. The report found 1,300 unique URLs that provided backlinks! The finalized report even creates simple graphs to categorize and present your data. You can export the report to CSV, Excel or PDF if you need/want to.
Missing Links Tool
The world of online marketing is highly competitive. One of the biggest advantages a company can get is having a clear understanding of what the competition is doing and how you can catch up. There is where the Link Research Tools Missing Links Tools comes in handy. The Missing Links Tool compares your competitors’ and your own backlinks and shows you the domains where they have links but you don’t!
Link Juice Recovery Tool
One of the most common SEO mistakes a site owner can make is to have dead pages on their site that still have active backlinks. A-this detracts from the overall user-experience. B-it looks bad to the search engines and C-it is a waste of link juice. The Link Juice Recovery Tool identifies those deleted pages on your site that still have backlinks directing traffic to them. This gives you the chance to 301 redirect those backlinks to active pages on your site.
Bonus: Link Reasearch Tools has a special tool (.htaccess Generator) to help you redirect any active links.
Competitive Landscape Analyzer
Using metrics like Basic and Advanced Social votes, Google Factors, and Basic SEO Stats (among others), The Competitive Landscape Analyzer compares competing sites for any keyword you want. The Keyword Classification feature (activated if Anchor Text is selected as a metric) allows you to create a comparison between Brand, Money and other keywords. This can be extremely valuable information when selecting keywords to target. Highly competitive keywords are going to take much longer to rank well for, and will mostly likely be more expensive to use in a PPC campaign.
Link Alerts
This tool is similar to Google Alerts, although it watches out for new backlinks as opposed to pages ranking for selected keywords. As soon as new backlinks to your site are identified, Link Research Tools will notify you. This tool is a great way to keep track of natural links that develop overtime, as well as other actively pursued links that don’t go live right away. It’s also a good way to keep an eye out for any “bad” links (pornography sites, gambling sites, etc) to your site.
The other five tools in the Link Research Tools toolkit include the Common Backlinks Tool, the Link Juice Thief, the Juice Tool (Bulk URL Analyzer), the Strongest Subpages Tool, and the SERP Recovery Tool.
Between the 10 research tools, 21 different sources of backlinks and more than 50 comparison metrics, Link Research Tools could probably provide you with more data about your backlinks than you could ever effectively sort though. Luckily, they let you adjust each report so you get the exact information you need when you need it. And if you aren’t sure what metrics you should be including in your report, they have this great metrics guide to take you through each one.
If you want a great set of tools on hand to help with every aspect of your link building, Link Research Tools would be a great investment.