SEO World

So what are we calling it today? Link building, link prospecting, content marketing, linkbait, socialbait, PR ? Whatever it is and whatever sub-definitions exist for the process of finding quality, related websites to link back to yours is difficult and time-consuming work.

As with most processes associated with SEO campaigns, or website marketing campaigns in general, enterprising folks have built tools to make our lives a little easier and our time more fruitful and productive. A couple of those enterprising fellows are Garrett French and Darren Shaw (from Whitespark.Ca) over at Citation Labs.

Garrett has a suite of link building (posicionamiento web) tools available, many of them complement his flagship tool; The Link Prospector.

Link Prospector Review TOC

To help you navigate to specific sections of the review we’ve included in-content links below.

• Getting Started
• Selecting a Report
• Customizing Your Prospecting
• Working With the Data
• Creating Your Own Queries
• Garrett’s Pro Tips
• Free Credits and Pricing

Getting Started

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So let’s assume I’ve been contracted to embark on a link building (posicionamiento web) campaign for SeoBook It’s very easy to create a campaign and get up and running:

Create your campaign:

Move right into the prospects section:

Start prospecting

Selecting a Report

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The nice thing about this tool is that it’s designed for a specific purpose; link prospecting. It’s not bloated with a bunch of other stuff you may not need and it’s easy to use, yet powerful, because it focus on doing one thing and doing it very well.

The UI of this tool is right on the money, in my opinion. Garrett has built in his own queries to find specific types of links for you (preset Reports). Here you can see the reports available to you, which are built to help you find common link types:

Customizing Your Prospecting

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As you can see, there are a variety of built in queries available which run the gamut of most of the link outreach goals you might have (interviews, resource pages, guest posts, directories, and so on). Once you settle on the report type it’s time to select additional parameters like:

• Region
• Web or Blog, or Web AND Blog results
• Search Depth (You can go up to 1,000 deep here, but if you make use of your exclusion lists you shouldn’t have to dive that deep)
• TLD Options
• Date Range (Google’s “past our, day, week, month, year, or anytime” options)

Try to make your queries as relevant but broad as possible to get the best results. Searches that are too specific will either net to few results or many of your direct competitors. Here, you can see my report parameters for interviews I may want to do in specific areas of SEO (Garrett includes a helpful video on that page, which I highly recommend watching):

Using Exclusions

The use of exclusions is an often overlooked feature of this toolset. Brands are all over the SERPs these days so when you have the Link Prospector go out to crawl potential link sources based on keywords/queries, you’ll want to make sure you exclude sites you are fairly certain you won’t get a link from.

You may want to exclude such sites as Ebay, Amazon, NewEgg, and so on if you are running a site about computer parts. You can put your exclusions into 2 categories:

• Global Exclusions
• Campaign Exclusions

Global exclusions apply to each campaign automatically. You might want to go out and download top 100 site lists (or top 1,000) lists to stick in the Global Exclusions area or simply apply specific sites you know are irrelevant to your prospecting on the whole. To access Exclusion lists, just click on the exclusion option. From there, it’s just a matter of entering your domains:

Campaign exclusions only apply to a specific campaign. This is good news if you provide link building (posicionamiento web) services and work with a variety of clients; you are not constrained to one draconian exclusion list. In speaking with Garrett, he does mention that this is an often overlooked feature of the toolset but one of the most effective features (both Global and Campaign exclusions).

Working With the Data

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So I ran my report which was designed to find interviewees within certain broader areas of the SEO landscape. The tool will confirm submission of your request and email you when it’s complete, at any time you can go in and check the status of your reports by going to Prospects -> View Prospects. Here’s what the queue looks like:

The results are presented in a web interface but can be easily exported to excel. From the web interface, you can see:

• Total Domains
• Total Paths (pages on the domain where relevancy exists, maybe we would find a relevant video channel on YouTube where it makes sense to reach out)
• TLD
• LTS – Link Target Score
• PR of Domain
• Export Options

LTS is a proprietary score provided by Citation Labs (essentially a measure of domain frequency and position within the SERPs pulled back for a given report).

If we expand the domain to see the paths, using Search Engine Land as an example, we can see pages where targets outside of the main domain might exist for our interviewing needs:

This is where Citation Labs really shines. Rather than just spitting back a bunch of domains for you to pursue at a broad level, it breaks down authoritative domains into specific prospecting opportunities which are super-relevant to your query/keyword relationship.

If you are on Windows (or run Windows via a virutal machine) you can use SEO Tools for Excel to take all these URLs, or the ones you want to target, and pull in social metrics, backlink data, and many other data points to further refine your list.

You can also import this data right into Buzzstream (export from Citation Labs to a CSV or Excel, then import into Buzzstream) and Buzzstream will go off and look up relevant social and contact details for outreach purposes.

We recently did a Buzzstream Review that you might find helpful.

You can also utilize Garrett’s Contact Finder for contact research.

Creating Your Own Queries

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Another nice thing about Citation Labs’s Link Prospector is that you can enter your own query parameters. You are not locked in to any specific type of data output (even though the built in ones are solid). You can do this by selecting “Custom” in the report selection field

In the Custom Report area you can create your own search operators along with the following options:

• Region
• Web or Blog, or Web AND Blog results
• Search Depth (You can go up to 1,000 deep here, but if you make use of your exclusion lists you shouldn’t have to dive that deep)
• TLD Options
• Date Range (Google’s “past our, day, week, month, year, or anytime” options)

One of the tools we mention quite a bit inside the forums is the Solo SEO Link Search Tool. You can grab a lot of search operators from that tool for your own use inside the Citation Labs tool.

Garrett’s Pro Tips

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Can you give us some tips on using the right phrases?

One objection I hear from folks who test the link prospector is “my results are full of competitors.” This is typically because the research phrases they’ve selected don’t line up with the type of prospects they’re seeking. And more often than not it’s because they’ve added their target SEO keywords rather than “category keywords” that define their area of practice.

The solution is simple though – you just need to experiment with some “bigger head” phrases. Instead of using “Atlanta Divorce Lawyer” for guest post prospecting, try just “Divorce Lawyer,” or even “Divorce.”

And I’d definitely recommend experimenting with the tilde “~Divorce” as it will help with synonyms that you may not have thought of. So if you’re looking for guest posting opportunities for a divorce lawyer your five research phrases could look like this:

divorce
~divorce
~divorce -divorce
Divorce ~Lawyer
“family law”

The link prospector tool will take these five phrases and combine them with 20+ guest posting footprints so we end up doing 100+ queries for you. And there WILL be domain repetitions due to the close semantic clustering of these phrases. This overlap can help “float up” the best opportunities based on our LTS score (which is essentially a measurement of relevance).

All this said there are PLENTY of situations where using your SEO keywords can be productive… For example in guest posting it’s common for people to use competitive keywords as anchor text. You could (and yes I’m completely contradicting my example) use “Atlanta Divorce Lawyer” as a guest posting research phrase along with your other target SEO KWs. The prospects that come back will probably have been placed by competitors.

How do you fine-tune your research phrases?

I often test my research phrases before throwing them in the tool. Let’s go back to the divorce guest posting example above. To test I simply head to Google and search [divorce "guest post"]. If I see 4 or more results in the top 10 that look like “maybes” I consider that a good keyword to run with. The test footprint you should use will vary from report-type to report-type.

A good links page test is to take a potential research phrase and add intitle:links. For content promoters you could combine a potential research phrase with intitle:”round up”.

I find that this testing does two things. For one it helps me drop research phrases that are only going to clog my reports with junk.

Secondarily I often discover new phrases that are likely to be productive. Look back at the list of divorce research phrases above – the last one, “family law,” is there because I spotted it while testing [~divorce "guest post"]. Spending time in Google is always, always productive and I highly advise it.

What tips can you give us regarding proper Search Depth usage?

Depth is a measure of how many results the link prospector brings back from Google. How often do you find useful results on the third page of Google? How about the tenth page? There’s a gem now and again, but I find that if I’ve carefully selected 5 awesome research phrases I save time by just analyzing the results in the top 20.

Your mileage may vary, and the tool DOES enable users to scrape all the way down to 1000 for those rare cases where you have discovered a mega-productive footprint. Test it once for sure, don’t just take my word for it – my guess is you’ll end up with tons of junk that actually kills the efficiency that the tool creates.

Any more expert tips on how to best use phrases and search operators?

You can addadvanced search operators in all your research phrases. Combine them with your research phrases and try them out in Google first (see tip 2) and then use them as you see fit. I use the heck out of the tilde now, as it saves me time and aids in research phrase discovery when I vet my phrases in Google. The tilde even works in conjunction with the wildcard operator (*).

So if you’re looking for law links pages you could test [~law* intitle:links] and then add ~law* as one of your research phrases if it seems productive. It’s not super productive by the way, because the word “code” is a law synonym… but I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t test, and if I didn’t test I’d end up with link prospetor results that don’t have anything to do with the targets I’m seeking.

Any tips on how to best leverage Exclusions (beyond putting in sites like google.com into your Global Exclusions )

If you have junk, not-ops that keeps turning up in your reports, add the domain as domain.com and www.domain.com to the exclusions file. Poof. It’s gone from future reports you run.

You can even add the domains you’ve already viewed so they won’t show up anymore. Be careful though – make sure you’re adding them to your campaign-level excludes rather than Global.

How often do you update the tool and what is coming down the pike?

If you sign up and you find yourself asking “I wonder what would happen if I…” please write me an email. If I don’t have an answer for you I will send you credits for you to do some testing. I will end up learning from you. I have users continually pushing the limits with the tool and finding new ways to use it.

We’ve added PR for domains, titles and snippets for each URL, blog-only search, and fixed numerous bugs and inefficiencies based on requests from our users. We’re also bringing in DA, MozRank and an API because of user requests.

Thanks Garrett!!

Free Trial and Pricing

Citation Labs is currently offering a free trial. They have monthly and per credit (love that!) pricing as well. You can find their pricing structure here.

Jim Boykin recently released a free, but powerful tool, that can help you check on broken links, redirects, in addition to helping you generate a Google Sitemap.

Being a free, web-based tool you might think it’s a bit lightweight but you’d be wrong It can crawl up to 10,000 internal pages, up to 5 runs per day per user.

In addition to the features mentioned above, the tool offers other helpful data points as well as the ability to export the data to CSV/Excel, HTML, and the ability to generate a Google XML Sitemap.

The other data points available to you are:

• URL of the page spidered
• Link to an On-Page SEO report for that URL
• Link depth from the home page
• HTTP status code
• Internal links to the page (with the ability to get a report off the in-links themselves)
• External links on the page (a one-click report is available to see the outlinks)
• Overall size of the page with a link to the Google page speed tool (cool!)
• Link to their Image check tool (size, alt text, header check of the page)
• Rows for Title Tag, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
• Canonical tag field

Using the Tool

The tool is really easy to use, just enter the domain, the crawl depth, and your email if you don’t care to watch the magic happen live

For larger crawls entering your email makes a lot of sense as it can take a bit on big crawls:

Click Ninja Check and off you go!

Working With The Data

The top of the results page auto-updates and shows you:

• Status of the report
• Internal pages crawled
• External links found
• Internal redirects found
• External redirects found
• Internal and External errors

When you click any of the yellow text(s) you are brought to that specific report table (which are below the main results I’ll show you below).

This is also where you can export the XML sitemap, download results to Excel/HTML.

The results pane (broken up into 2 images given the horizontal length of the table) looks like:

More to the right is:

The On Page Report

If you click on the On Page Report link in the first table you are brought to their free On-Page Optimization Analysis tool. Enter the URL and 5 targeted phrases:

Their tool does the following:

• Metadata tool: Displays text in title tags and meta elements
• Keyword density tool: Reveals statistics for linked and unlinked content
• Keyword optimization tool: Shows the number of words used in the content, including anchor text of internal and external links
• Link Accounting tool: Displays the number and types of links used
• Header check tool: Shows HTTP Status Response codes for links
• Source code tool: Provides quick access to on-page HTML source code

The data is presented in the same table form as the original crawl. This first section shows the selected domain and keywords in addition to on-page items like your title tag, meta description, meta keywords, external links on the page, and words on the page (linked and non-linked text).

You can also see the density of all words on the page in addition to the density of words that are not links, on the page.

Next up is a word breakdown as well as the internal links on the page (with titles, link text, and response codes).

The word cloud displays targeted keywords in red, linked words underlined, and non-linked words as regular text.

You’ll see a total word count, non-linked word count, linked word count, and total unique words on the.

This can be helpful in digging into deep on-page optimization factors as well as your internal link layout on a per page basis:

Next, you’ll get a nice breakdown of internal links and the text of those links, the titles, and the words in the url.

Also, you can see any links to sub-domains as well as external links (with anchor text and response codes):

Each section has a show/hide option where you can see all the data or just a snippet.

Another report you get access to is the image checker (accessible from the main report “Check Image Info” option):

Here you’ll get a report that shows a breakdown of the files and redirects on the page in addition to the image link, image dimensions, file size, alt text, and a spot to click to view the image:

After that section is the link section which shows the actual link, the file type (html, css, etc), status code and a link check (broken, redirect, ok, and so on)

Additional Reports

The main report referenced at the beginning of this post is the Internal Page Report. There are five additional reports:

• External Links
• Internal Redirects
• External Redirects
• Internal Errors
• External Errors

External Links

This report will show you:

• HTTP Status
• Internal links to the external link
• Actual link URL
• Link anchor text
• Where the link was first found on the domain

Internal and External Redirects

• HTTP Status
• Internal links to the external link
• Actual link URL
• Link anchor text
• Page the URL redirects to

Internal and External Errors

Give it a Spin

It’s free but more importantly it’s quite useful. I find a lot of value in this tool in a variety of ways but mostly with the ability to hone in on your (or your competitor’s) internal site and linking structure.

There are certainly a few on-page tools on the marketing but I found this tool easy to use and full of helpful information, especially with internal structure and link data.

Try it.

Ahrefs is the newest entry into the link research tool space. They use their own bot and their own index (which they state is based on information from a trillion website connections).

They claim their index is updated every 30 minutes and the fresh data is available to their users within 30 minutes of the actual index refresh.

Ahrefs also has a ranking database of roughly 45 million keywords from 9 different countries (US GB FR RU DE ES IT AU BR). The tools within their membership are:

• Site Explorer
• SERPs Analysis
• Reports
• Labs/Tools

Their pricing is very straight-forward and only increases or decreases based on volume of data you have access to. You can check out the easy to understand pricing on their pricing page (and they offer SEO Book readers a 50% discount on the first month).

Site Explorer

Ahref’s Site Explorer functions in a similar way to Majestic’s Site Explorer and SeoMoz’s Site Explorer. You can choose a specific URL, the domain without subdomains, or domain with all its subdomains:

If we look at the Site Explorer results, you’ll see an overview of the last 45 days or so from Ahref’s crawl history:

On the left you can see some interesting stats like the total number of backlinks, different referring IP’s and subnets (class c blocks and such), unique domains, and the types of backlinks the site has (text, image, redirects, and so on).

In addition to the overview report, you have other research options to chose from:

• New Links
• Lost Links (great opportunity for you to swoop in and alert the linker + sell them on linking to you and your resources)
• Anchor Text Profile
• Pages Crawled on the Site
• Referring Domain Breakdown
• SERP Positions (organic ranking report)
• Raw Export of the Data (up to your limits based on your pricing plan)

New Links

In the New Link tab you can go back to a previous month, or work inside the current month, and find newly discovered links by the day. Here is what that looks like:

Click on whatever day you want and you’ll get a list of linking urls, the target link page, and the anchor text used for the link:

This report can help you reverse engineer, down to the day, a link building (posicionamiento web) campaign that your competitor is running (always good to be out in front of a big link push by a competitor) and can also help you evaluate your own link campaign or even help you spot a link growth issue that may have resulted in some kind of penalty or over-optimization filter.

Now keep in mind that, based on their stated crawling guidelines, the stronger links from stronger sites tend to get crawled more frequently so the spammiest of the spammy link approaches might not get picked up on. For that level of deep research a historical report from Majestic SEO and a link status checker, like Advanced Link Manager, is likely a better bet.

You can export this report to Excel or .CSV format.

Lost Links

The Lost Links tab has the same interface as the New Links report does. For your own domain you might want to consider tracking your own links in something like Raven or Buzzstream but this tool does report dropped links down to the day. Combine that with their crawling preferences (better links = quicker attention) and you can spot drops of substance quickly.

You can use this report to find links that a competitor has lost, off of which you can contact the webmaster and see if you can’t promote your site or similar content to earn the link your competitor was previously getting.

You can export this report to Excel or .CSV format.

Anchor Text

The anchor text report is exactly what you expect it to be. It lists the anchor texts of external links, the number of occurrences, as well as an expandable dropdown menu to see the pages being linked from and the pages being linked to on the site you are researching.

You can export to Excel or .CSV and choose to export everything, up to your limit, or just the current page.

Crawled Pages

This report will show you all the pages crawled by Ahrefs with the following stats:

• Page URL and Title
• Crawl Date
• Page Size
• Internal Links
• External Links

I would likely use this report (on competitors) for checking some of their more popular internally linked-to pages as well as checking out how they structure their site. You can also jump right to a site explorer report for any of the URL’s listed on that report as well as check the SERP positions for any of them.

Referring Domains

One thing I like about Ahrefs is that it’s straight and to the point. It’s very easy to get in, get your data, and get out. Each report does pretty much what you expect it to. This report shows the referring domains + number links coming from that domain. You can access the links from each domain by clicking the Expand button next to the referring domain:

SERP Positioning

Similar to SemRush, Ahref’s provides estimated ranking data for keyword sets on both Google and Bing/Yahoo in multiple countries (US, UK, AU, DE, FR, ES, IT, BR, RU). The tool shows the:

• Position
• Keyword
• CPC
• Estimated cost
• Ranking url
• Global search volume
• Advertiser competition
• Last date checked
• Rating (estimated visitors per month based on assumed traffic distribution)

The other cool thing about this report is that it will tell you the change from the last time they checked the ranking.

SERPs Analysis

This is similar to the SERP positioning report. Essentially, you enter a URL and you get the Google + Bing & Yahoo ranking data with those same metrics as stated above:

• Position
• Keyword
• CPC
• Estimated cost
• Ranking url
• Global search volume
• Advertiser competition
• Last date checked
• Rating (estimated visitors per month based on assumed traffic distribution)

In addition to that, you also have the following reports:

• Daily Stats
• History of Changes
• Ads Analysis

Daily Stats

This report shows you, on a daily basis, the following data points:

• New Keywords
• Lost Keywords
• Total Keywords that moved up
• Total Keywords that moved down
• Total Positions up
• Total Positions down
• Rating Change (estimated percentage of traffic gained or lost)
• Cost Change (rating change * CPC)

There are graphical charts for:

• Search Engine Traffic (shown above)
• Keyword Trend (total keywords ranking)
• Traffic Cost
• Bar Graph for New and Lost Keywords
• Estimated Traffic Changes
• Estimated Traffic Cost Changes

History of Changes

This report breaks down the keyword changes by day and how much the specific keyword moved up/down (and the corresponding page that is ranking).

You can look at a daily report, a 7 day report, 30 days, or a custom range.

Ads Analysis

Ahrefs also incorporates Google (and Bing/Yahoo but I had a hard time getting figures for Bing/Yahoo) PPC data. You can pull in the ranking of the ad, the ad text, volume & CPC data, as well as last updated date & competition levels.

You can look at just the keyword/ranking data or choose from their other 2 reports; keywords/ranking + ad text (Table + Ads) or just the PPC ad text itself (Ads Preview).

Reports

You can create reports for your own domain for free or a any other site as a part of your subscription. Each domain counts as a separate report, so you can enter as many as you are entitled to in this interface but they do count against your monthly allowance.

The report overview looks like this:

Each tab represents a data point you can review. In any tab you can choose to export the visible page or the entire report.

There are quite a few filtering options here, as you can see below:

Your filtering options, report-wide, are:

• URLs from – you can include or exclude based on user-defined data (exclude by word(s), domain extension, and so on)
• Backlinks Type – you can choose to show, specifically, different backlink types (nofollow, image, frame, redirect, form, deleted)
• Pages – show links only to a specific page
• Subdomain – show links only to a specific subdomain
• Countries – show links from specific countries
• Anchors – show or exclude specific anchor text links
• Referring Domains – show links from a specific domain, or set of domains only
• IP – show links from a specific IP or range of IP’s only
• Subnets – show backlinks only from specific subnets
• TLD – show links from specific TLD’s only
• Date – show links based on specific crawl period

The cool thing here is that you can layer on the filters as you wish. The following screenshot shows all filters selected and available:

The reporting is really quite powerful and provides numerous ways to quickly filter out junk links so you can focus on the good stuff.

Labs

There are 3 additional tools in their Labs section.

• Ahrefs Top – Top 1 million domains by number of backlinks, completely searchable
• Domain Comparison – compare up to 5 domains for different link metrics (see below)
• Batch Domains – (see below) dump in a bunch of URLs and get a total count of backlinks, referring domains, and IP’s. Unsure of the limit here but I did about 25 with no problem.

Here is a screenshot of the domain comparison feature:

The Batch Domains feature looks like this (and is completely exportable!):

Ahrefs is Worth a Spin

I was impressed with the speed of this tool, the exportability of the data, and the report filtering capabilities. It hardly hurts to have another link database to pull from, especially one that is updated every 30 minutes.

The tool is quite easy to use and it does pretty much what you expect it to. If you are into link research you should give this tool a try. The database appears to be a fairly good size for a new database and the ability to slice and dice that data from right within the web interface is a solid feature. If you do try it out, let us know what you think! We are also adding their link data to SEO for Firefox & the SEO Toolbar today.

Website Auditor is one of the 4 tools found in Link-Assistant’s SEO Power Suite. Website Auditor is Link-Assistant’s on-page optimization tool.

We recently reviewed 2 of their other tools, SEO Spyglass and Rank Tracker. You can check out the review of SEO Spyglass here and Rank Tracker here.

What Does Website Auditor Do?

Website Auditor crawls your entire site (or any site you want to research) and gives you a variety of on-page SEO data points to help you analyze the site you are researching.

We are reviewing the Enterprise version here, some options may not be available if you are using the Professional version.

In order to give you a thorough overview of a tool we think it’s best to look at all the options available. You can compare versions here.

Getting Started with Website Auditor

To get started, just enter the URL of the site you want to research:

I always like to enable the expert options so I can see everything available to me. Next step is to select the “page ranking factors:

Here, you have the ability to get the following data points from the tool on a per-page basis:

• HTTP status codes
• Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords
• Total links on the page
• Links on the page to external sites
• Robots.Txt instructions
• W3C validation errors
• CSS validation errors
• Any canonical URL’s associated with the page
• HTML Code Size
• Links on the page with the no-follow attribute

Your next option is to select the crawl depth. For deep analysis you can certainly select no crawl limit and click the option to find unlinked to pages in the index.

If you want to go nuts with the crawl depth frequently, I’d suggest looking into a VPS to house the application so you can run it remotely. Deep, deep crawls can take quite awhile.

I know HostGator’s VPS’s as well as a Rackspace Cloud Server can be used with this and I’m sure most VPS hosting options will allow for this as well.

I’m just going to run 2 clicks deep here for demonstration purposes.

Next up is filtering options. Maybe you only want to crawl a certain section or sections of a site. For example, maybe I’m just interested in the auto insurance section of the Geico site for competitive research purposes.

Also, for E-commerce sites you may want to exclude certain parameters in the URL to avoid mucked up results (or any site for that matter). Though there is an option (see below) where you can have Website Auditor treat pages that are similar but might have odd parameters as the same page.

Another option I like to use is pulling up just the blog section of a site to look for popular posts link-wise and social media wise. Whatever you want to do in this respect, you do it here:

So here, I’m included all the normal file extensions and extension-less files to include in the report and I’m looking for all the stuff under their quote section (as I’m researching the insurance quote market).

The upfront filtering is one of my favorite features because I exclude unnecessary pages from the crawl and only get exactly what I’m looking for, quickly. Now, click next and the report starts:

Working With the Results

Another thing I like about Link-Assistant Products is the familiar interface between all 4 of their products. If you saw are other reviews, you are familiar with the results pane below.

Before that, Website Auditor will ask you about getting more factors. When I do the initial crawl I do not include stuff that will cause captchas or require proxies, like cache dates and PR. But here, you can update and add more factors if you wish:

Once you click that, you are brought to the settings page and give the option to add more factors, I’ve specifically highlighted the social ones:

I’ll skip these for now and go back to the initial results section. This displays your initial results and I’ve also highlighted all the available options with colored arrows:

Your arrow legend is as follows:)

• Orange – You can save the current project or all projects, start a new project, close the project, or open another project
• Green – you can build an white-labeled Optimization report (with crawl, domain, link, and popularity metrics plugged in), Analyze a single page for on-page optimization, Update a workspace or selected pages or the entire project for selected factors, Rebuild the report with the same pages but different factors, or create an XML sitemap for selected webpages.
• Yellow – Search for specific words inside the report (I use this for narrowing down to a topic)
• Red – Create and update Workspaces to customize the results view
• Purple – Flip between the results pane, the white-label report, or with specific webpages for metric updates

Workspaces for Customizing Results

The Workspaces tab allows you to edit current Workspaces (add/remove metrics) or create new ones that you can rename whatever you want and which will show up in the Workspaces drop-down:

Simply click on the Workspaces icon to get to the Workspaces preference option:

You can create new workspaces, edit or remove old ones, and also set specific filtering conditions relative to the metrics available to you:

Spending some time upfront playing around with the Workspace options can save you loads of time on the backend with respect to drilling down to either specific page types, specific metrics, or a combination of both.

Analyzing a Page

When you go to export a Website Auditor file (you can also just control/command + a to select everything in the results pane and copy/paste to a spreadsheet) you’ll see 2 options:

• Page Ranking Factors (the data in the results pane)
• Page Content Data

You can analyze a page’s content (or multiple pages at once) for on-page optimization factors relative to a keyword you select.

There are 2 ways you can do this. You can highlight a page in the Workspace, right click and select analyze page content. Or, you can click on the Webpages button above the filter box then click the Analyze button in the upper left. Here is the dialog box for the second option:

The items with the red X’s next to them denote which pages can be analyzed (the pages just need to have content, often you see duplicates for /page and /page/)

So I want to see how the boat page looks, highlight it and click next to get to the area where you can enter your keywords:

Enter the keywords you want to evaluate the page against (I entered boat insurance and boat insurance quotes) then select what engine you want to evaluate the page against (this pulls competition data in from the selected engine).

The results pane here shows you a variety of options related to the keywords you entered and the page you selected:

You have the option to view the results by a single keyword (insurance) or multi-word keywords (boat insurance) or both. Usually I’m looking at multi-word keyphrases so that’s what I typically select and the report tells you the percentage the keyword makes up of a specific on-page factor.

The on-page factors are:

• Total page copy
• Body
• Title tag, meta description, and meta keywords
• H1 and H2-H6 (H2-H6 are grouped)
• Link anchor text
• % in bold and in italics
• Image text

Website Auditor takes all that to spit out a custom Score metric which is mean to illustrate what keyword is most prominent, on average, across the board.

You can create a white-label report off of this as well, in addition to being able to export the data the same way as the Page Factor data described above (CSV, HTML, XML, SQL, Cut and Paste).

Custom Settings and Reports

You have the option to set both global and per project preferences inside of Website Auditor.

Per Project Preferences:

• Customer information for the reports
• Search filters (extensions, words/characters in the URL, etc)
• Customizing Workspace defaults for the Website reports and the Web page report
• Setting up custom tags
• Selecting default Page Ranking Factors
• Setting up Domain factors (which appear on the report) like social metrics, traffic metrics from Compete and Alexa, age and ip, and factors similar to the Page Factors but for the domain)
• XML publishing information

Your Global preferences cover all the application specific stuff like:

• Proxy settings
• Emulation settings and Captcha settings
• Company information for reports
• Preferred search engines and API keys
• Scheduling
• Publishing options (ftp, email, html, etc)

Website Auditor also offers detailed reporting options (all of which can be customized in the Preferences area of the application). You can get customized reports for both Page Factor metrics and Page Content Metrics.

I would like to see them improve the reporting access a bit. The reports look nice and are helpful but customizing the text, or inputting your own narratives is accessed via a somewhat arcane dialog blog, where it makes it hard to fix if you screw up the code.

Give Website Auditor a Try

There are other desktop on-page/crawling tools on the market and some of them are quite good. I like some of the features inside of Website Auditor (report outputting, custom crawl parameters, social aspects) enough to continue using it in 2012.

I’ve asked for clarification on this but I believe their Live Plan (which you get free for the first 6 months) must be renewed in order for the application to interact with a search engine.

I do hope they consider changing that. I understand that some features won’t work once a search engine changes something, and that is worthy of a charge, but tasks like pulling a ranking report or executing a site crawl shouldn’t be lumped in with that.

Nonetheless, I would still recommend the product as it’s a good product and the support is solid but I think it’s important to understand the pricing upfront. You can find pricing details here for both their product fees and their Live Plan fees.

SEO Spyglass is one of the 4 tools Link-Assistant sells (individually) and as a part of their SEO Power Suite.

We did a review of their Rank Tracker application a few months ago and we plan to review their other 2 tools in upcoming blog posts.

Key Features of SEO Spyglass

The core features of SEO Spyglass are:

• Link Research
• White Label Reporting
• Historical Link Tracking

As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you’ll hit, depending on the version you choose. You can see the comparison here.

Perhaps the biggest feature is their newest feature. They recently launched their own link database, a couple of months early in beta, as the tool had been largely dependent on the now dead Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The launch of a third or fourth-ish link database (Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, A-Href’s rounding out the others) is a win for link researchers. It still needs a bit of work, as we’ll discuss below, but hopefully they plan on taking the some of the better features of the other tools and incorporating them into their tool.

After all, good artists copy and great artists steal

Setting Up a Project for a Specific Keyword

One of my pet peeves with software is feature bloat which in turn creates a rough user experience. Link-Assistant’s tools are incredibly easy to use in my experience.

Once you fire up SEO Spyglass you can choose to research links from a competing website or links based off of a keyword.

Most of the time I use the competitor’s URL when doing link research but SEO Spyglass doubles as a link prospecting tool as well, so here I’ll pick a keyword I might want to target “Seo Training”.

The next screen is where you’ll choose the search engine that is most relevant to where you want to compete. They have support for a bunch of different countries and search engines and you can see the break down on their site.

So if you are competing in the US you can pull data the top ranking site off of the following engines (only one at a time):

• Google
• Google Blog Search
• Google Groups
• Google Images
• Google Mobile
• YouTube
• Bing
• Yahoo! (similar to Bing of course)
• AOL
• Alexa
• Blekko
• And some other smaller web properties

I’ll select Google and the next screen is where you select the sources you want Spyglass to use for grabbing the links of the competing site it will find off of the preceding screen:

So SEO Spyglass will grab the top competitor from your chosen SERP will run multiple link sources off of that site (would love to see some API integration with Majestic and Open Site Explorer here).

This is where you’ll see their own Backlink Explorer for the first time.

Next you can choose unlimited backlinks (Enterprise Edition only) or you can limit it by
Project or Search Engine. For the sake of speed I’m going to limit it to 100 links per search engine (that we selected in a previous screen) and exclude duplicates (links found in one engine and another) just to get the most accurate, usable data possible:

When you start pinging engines, specifically Google in this example, you routinely will get captcha’s like this:

On this small project I entered about 8 of them and the project found 442 backlinks (here is what you’ll see after the project is completed):

One way around captchas is to either pay someone to run this tool for you and manually do it, but for large projects that is not ideal as captcha’s will pile up and you could get the IP temporarily banned.

Link-Assistant offers an Anti-Captcha plan to combat this issue, you can see the pricing here.

Given the size of the results pane it is hard to see everything but you are initially returned with:

• an icon of what search engine the link was found in
• the backlinking page
• the backlinking domain

Spyglass will then ask you if you want to update the factors associated with these links.

Your options by default are:

• domain age
• domain ip
• domain PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz Listing
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• On-page info (title, meta description, meta keywords)
• Total links to the page
• External links to other sites from the page
• Page rank of the page itself

You can add more factors by clicking the Add More button. You’re taken to the Spyglass Preferences pane where you can add more factors:

You can add a ton of social media stuff here including popularity on Facebook, Google +, Page-level Twitter mentions and so on.

You can also pick up bookmarking data and various cache dates. Keep in mind that the more you select, especially with stuff like cache date, you are likely to run into captcha’s.

SEO Spyglass also offers Search Safety Settings (inside of the preferences pane, middle of the left column in the above screenshot) where you can update human emulation settings and proxies to both speed up the application and to help avoid search engine bans.

I’ve used Trusted Proxies with Link-Assistant and they have worked quite well.

You can’t control the factors globally, you have to do it for each project but you can update Spyglass to only offer you specific backlink sources.

I’m going to deselect PageRank here to speed up the project (you can always update later or use other tools for PageRank scrapes).

Working With the Results

When the data comes back you can do number of things with it. You can:

• Build a custom report
• Rebuild it if you want to add link sources or backlink factors
• Update the saved project later on
• Analyze the links within the application
• Update and add custom workspaces

These options are all available within the results screen (again, this application is incredibly easy to use):

I’ve blurred out the site information as I see little reason to highlight the site here. But you can see where the data has populated for the factors I selected.

In the upper left hand corner of the applications is where you can build the report, analyze the data from within the application, update the project, or rebuild it with new factors:

All the way to the right is where you can filter the data inside the application and create a
new workspace:

Your filtering options are seen to the left of the workspaces here. It’s not full blown filtering and sorting but if you are looking for some quick information on specific link queries, it can be helpful.

Each item listed there is a Workspace. You can create your own or edit one of the existing ones. Whatever factors you include in the Workspace is what will show in the results pane as factors

So think of Workspaces as your filtering options. Your available metrics/columns are

• Domain Name
• Search Engine (where the link was found)
• Last Found Date (for updates)
• Status of Backlink (active, inactive, etc)
• Country
• Page Title
• Links Back (does the link found by the search engine actually link to the site? This is a good way of identifying short term, spammy link bursts)
• Anchor Text
• Link Value (essentially based on the original PageRank formula)
• Notes (notes you’ve left on the particular link). This is very limited and is essentially a single Excel-type row
• Domain Age/IP/PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• Total Links to page/domain
• External links
• Page-level PR

Most of the data is useful. I think the link value is overvalued a bit based on my experience finding links that often had 0 link value in the tool but clearly benefited the site it ended up linking to.

PageRank queries in bulk will cause lots of captcha’s and given how out of date PR can be it isn’t a metric I typically include on large reports.

Analyzing the Data

When you click on the Analyze tab in the upper left you can analyze in multiple ways:

• All backlinks found for the project
• Only backlinks you highlight inside the application
• Only backlinks in the selected Workspace

The Analyze tab is a separate window overlaying the report:

You can’t export from this window but if you just do a control/command-a you can copy and paste to a spreadsheet.

Your options here:

• Keywords – keywords and ratios of specific keywords in the title and anchor text of backlinks
• Anchor Text – anchor text distribution of links
• Anchor URL – pages being linked to on the site and the percentages of link distribution (good for evaluating deep link distribution and pages targeted by the competing site as well as popular pages on the site…content ideas )
• Webpage PR
• Domain PR
• Domains linking to the competing site and the percentage
• TLD – percentage of links coming from .com, net, org, info, uk, and so on
• IP address – links coming from IP’s and the percentages
• Country breakdown
• Dmoz- backlinks that are in Dmoz and ones that are not
• Yahoo! – same as Dmoz
• Links Back – percentages of links found that actually link to the site in question

Updating and Rebuilding

Updating is pretty self-explanatory. Click the Update tab and select whether or not to update all the links, the selected links, or the Workspace specific links:

(It’s the same dialog box as when you actually set up the project)

Rebuilding the report is similar to updating except updating doesn’t allow you to change the specified search engine.

When you Rebuild the report you can select a new search engine. This is helpful when comparing what is ranking in Google versus Bing.

Click Rebuild and update the search engine plus add/remove backlink factors.

Reporting

There are 2 ways to get to the reporting data inside of Spyglass

There is a quick SEO Report Tab and the Custom Report Builder:

Much like the Workspaces in the prior example, there are reporting template options on the right side of the navigation:

It functions the same way as Workspaces do in terms of being able to completely customize the report and data. You can access your Company Profile (your company’s information and logo), Publishing Profiles (delivery methods like email, FTP, and so on), as well as Report Templates in the settings option:

You can’t edit the ones that are there now except for playing around with the code used to generate the report. It’s kind of an arcane way to do reporting as you can really hose up the code (below the variables in red is all the HTML):

You can create your own template with the following reporting options:

• Custom introduction
• All the stats described earlier on this report as available backlink factors
• Top 30 anchor URLs
• Top 30 anchor texts
• Top 30 links by “link value”
• Top 30 domains by “link value”
• Conclusion (where you can add your own text and images)

Overall the reporting options are solid and offer lots of data. It’s a little more work to customize the reports but you do have lots of granular customization options and once they are set up you can save them as global preferences.

As with other software tools you can set up scheduled checks and report generation.

Researching a URL

The process for researching a URL is the same as described above, except you already know the URL rather than having SEO Spyglass find the top competing site for it.

You have the same deep reporting and data options as you do with a keyword search. It will be interesting to watch how their database grows because, for now, you can (with the Enterprise version) research an unlimited number of backlinks.

SEO Spyglass in Practice

Overall, I would recommend trying this tool out. If nothing else, it is another source of backlinks which pulls from other search engines as well (Google, Blekko, Bing, etc).

The reporting is good and you have a lot of options with respect to customizing specific link data parameters for your reports.

I would like to see more exclusionary options when researching a domain. Like the ability to filter redirects and sub-domain links. It doesn’t do much good if we want a quick, competitive report but a quarter or more of the report is from something like a subdomain of the site you are researching.

SEO Spyglass’s pricing is as follows:

• Purchase a professional option or an enterprise option (comparison)
• 6 months of their Live Plan for free
• Purchase of a Live Plan required after 6 months to continue using the tool’s link research functionality.
• Pricing for all editions and Live Plans can be found here

In running a couple of comparisons against Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO it was clear that Spyglass has a decent database but needs more filtering options (sub-domains mainly). It’s not as robust as OSE or Majestic yet, but it’s to be expected. I still found a variety of unique links from its database that I did not see on other tools across the board.

You can get a pretty big discount if you purchase their suite of tools as a bundle rather than individually