We all know that there are a million things you can do to improve your search rankings these days. Some experts will say to do this while others will say to do that. The one thing that most of them will all agree on though is that good, quality backlinks, are still the trump card when it comes to securing high rankings.
At the end of the day though, a few questions remain. Where do you go to get quality backlinks? More importantly, how do you know if all your hard work is paying off?
For this reason I'm going to share with you 3 tools I use on a regular bases. These are tools that will absolutely help you in your SEO efforts during 2016.
GuestPostTracker.com
Purpose: Link Building/Brand Awareness
Website: http://www.guestposttracker.com
Cost: $5 mo.
Have you ever tried to find sites that allow guest posts? Getting exposure from the right blog can offer legitimate SEO value and branding exposure but "Wow" the process can be exhausting. There are several free lists of blogs that bloggers have put together but I've found that a majority of the lists are outdated.
Guest Post Tracker is a one-stop-shop for an up-to-date list of blogs that are currently accepting guest posts. With their list separated into niche categories this awesome tool helps you to zero in on blogs in your category that will offer optimal potential for your content and they are adding new blogs to their list of over 600 guest post blogs pretty much every day.
Another cool feature of GPT is that it is a tracking tool. Waste no more time wondering "Have I submitted here before?" or where you should submit next. They keep everything organized for you. Even tracking what anchors you're using for a more precise SEO campaign.
WebMeUp.com
Purpose: Backlink Monitoring
Website: http://www.webmeup.com
Cost: Free / $59 mo / $149 mo
I've seen a few backlink checkers in my day. Let's be honest, they're all pretty much the same. They all pull the same data using the same api. In the end all we really have left to compare them is display, readability and user friendliness.
WebMeUp is a backlink checker that stands out from the rest (at least for me). Their dashboard shows your data, or your competitors data, on a clean bootstrap display with easy to read graphs and charts.
What really makes WebMeUp stand out in my eyes though is the fact that they crawl links daily and they'll actually remove links from your reports if they're dead and gone. If you're like me you hate seeing links that aren't even around anymore and have been gone for ages. This unique feature really lends credibility to the quality of this tool.
RankTrackr.com
Purpose: Backlink Monitoring
Website: http://www.ranktrackr.com
Cost: Free / $59 mo / $149 mo
It doesn't matter if you own a website or if you're an SEO there is one thing we all need, want or must have. That is, the ability to effectively and regularly monitor your rankings. Without this ability we'd never know if what we're doing, day in and day out, is actually working.
RankTrackr is hands down one of the most simplistic and effective ranking tools I have seen in a long time. Their bootstrap dashboard is easy to navigate and provides incredibly valuable insight to your SEO campaign.
In addition to providing current rankings for your website this cutting edge resource also provides urls of ranking pages, global monthly search volume and downloadable reporting.
Final thoughts, Guest Post Tracker is going to be the newest and most powerful tool in your SEO arsenal. WebMeUp is going to be a nice change of scenery when checking your backlink profile for 2016 and lastly, if you're not too careful RankTrackr is going to be your new favorite thing to do in your spare time, it may even replace 'Facebooking'.