Link Assistant part of the SEO Powersuite performs what many digital marketing professionals consider the most important or controversial functions.
Link Creation and Management
Whereas SEO Spyglass deals with the reporting and management of existing link profiles, Link Assistant is concerned with highlighting opportunities to create these links in the first place. This powerful software provides the busy digital marketer or digital marketing agency with a comprehensive tool set that allows links to be created (or encouraged).
Many of our clients rely on us to promote them in Google. For that we need to know that we are providing them with high quality links on relevant sites that are powerful and safe. Link Assistant and the other tools in SEO Powersuite make our life a lot easier. They provide high quality professional reports we can brand up and forward directly to each client. An essential tool that has paid for itself many times over.
Link Creation or Link Encouragement?
Let’s deal with the reality of commercial website promotion first. Unless you are a brand name, if your website competes in a competitive marketplace for the products or services you offer, then ranking well in Google for terms and phrases that will attract clients or customers to your website will require links. That is the simple fact of the issue.
While LSI (latent semantic indexing) might work to rank low commerciality keywords in none competitive markets, as soon as you move to valuable and competitive niches, then links are vital. Without a solid link profile your SEO efforts will not work.
Powerful and Safe
Balancing the scales against this requirement is the knowledge that “gamed” links. Bought links or spam links can actually be harmful to your websites health and could (in extreme instances) actually lead to a ranking penalty or even a ban for your website meaning it does not appear in Google at all.
Link Assistant, part of the SEO Powersuite provides digital marketers and business owners looking to leverage their own skills in SEO, with a set of highly focused tools that not only highlight a huge range of link building possibilities, but also allow you to manage link profiles, understand link value and communicate with 3rd party websites in the pursuit of creating mutually beneficial relationships that could lead to traffic flow and link creation. So, how is this achieved?
The Search for Link Prospects using Link Assistant
Guest Posting and Communication Management
Guest posting. Creating a blog post for another webmaster on information sites, general sites or in the horizontal or vertical line of integration from your own market. This is to avoid asking direct competitors for links.
Link Assistant will spend some time harvesting the internet based on specific keywords and return a list of blogs and other information style sites that are potential guest post partners.
As with all potential link types there are some filters and contact criteria you may want to employ to narrow the field down to the best targets that offer the most value. These are covered in our “Filter for Best Value” sub heading below.
Here is the clever bit. From this point Link Assistant helps you every step of the way in terms of managing the process of contacting the webmasters and developing relationships.
The next step would be to configure the built-in email handler. This is the tool that will control the flow of information between you and the potential guest post targets. It is an ideally featured mail server. Add you email address and ingoing and outbound server settings and you are ready to start preparing your introduction emails.
The advantage here is the mail merge style features that mean one email with the correct tags can be used to contact many hundreds or even thousands of identified webmasters.
The limit her will likely be your own email service provider who may have a maximum number of mails allowed within a certain period. In our own experience Gmail will allow around 190 emails a day spread at around 8 per hour. The amount that is allowed will depend on the criteria from your own email provider.
What is a Good Backlink?
Important note: This is not spam. You are offering a genuine opportunity to these website owners to have you (or your employees) to write content on their behalf. A valuable commodity and an important ranking factor for them. Also bear in mind that Link Assistant has provided you only with relevant websites and you have taken the further step of filtering those down only to the most appropriate.
This is a targeted email outreach offering a valuable service to specific niche websites.
From this point you may want an email sequence. An introduction, a reminder of the offer if they do not reply or a response when they do. A detailed follow up for the positive replies offering an exact article title and perhaps the sort of research you are prepared to do and the word count as a minimum. Finally, for those who have not replied to either of your first 2 outreach attempts you may want to send a final offer. Best practice is to stop at three approach attempts.
The mail server within Link Assistant will provide excellent tools for managing these relationships. Allowing you to tag, filter and respond to many with just a few clicks. Remember you only need to write each email once and put the appropriate tags in (like the way “mail merge” works”). Link Assistant will handle all the busy work for you.
Commenting
Blog commenting specifically. Finding blogs in the market vertical or horizontal via Link Assistant’s Blog Commenting search function, then writing constructive comments in the comment section of a blog post.
It is common practice for these comment boxes to allow you to put your own name, email address and website URL in the identifier. It might also be possible, especially if you write a long enough comment with sufficient valuable content that might require its own citation, to add a link to the comment text itself.
In terms of content, it is important to write unique comments, on topic and adding value. To this end best practice is to thoroughly read and understand the blog post you are writing for and add something constructive to the conversation – even if that is your own opinion. We look to write comments of no less than 150 words and typically 500 words plus. However, we “save” the comment on our own text files in case it is rejected. It can then perhaps be adapted and/or used again.
Selecting the right blogs to comment requires some effort to filter out those that are spammy. The criteria we use to root out blogs we do not want to comment on include
- Too many existing comments.
- Having several comments that contain clear spam link. (links that are clearly not relevant)
- Old blog posts with open comments sections but no published comments. In this case assume all comments are likely automatically deleted.
Are Blog Comments Good Links?
Over the years commenting has had some bad publicity. Specifically, because there are spam tools on the market that can create many thousands of spam blog comments in a few hours.
Link Assistant does not do this, not does it facilitate this. Link Assistant (part of SEO Powersuite) lists only blogs relevant to your market based on the keywords you provide, then gives you the table of metrics for that blog allowing you to select only the best and most relevant ones to attempt to publish hand crafted content.
Your Link Profile
As part of a varied and sensible link profile, Blog comments have a role to play as much as any other link type. Especially true of the links are surrounded by solid content. Therefore, writing longer more thoughtful comments that have a link embedded is the gold standard.
1 good link on a relevant website surrounded by good content is worth a thousand spam links.
While Link Assistant helps you to create good links and the other tools in SEO Powersuite will help you manage all aspects of your online marketing, there will always be links created by others to your site. After all that is the main aim of your link encouragement effort. Monitoring these links in a tool such as SEO Spyglass and removing any that do not fit your desired link profile is part of the overall process of managing you online SEO presence.
Forum Involvement
Forums offer multiple ways to gain traffic. Not just to create links. As usual Link Assistant fetches a list of forums, along with associated website quality metrics based on a list of keywords that the user provides.
As usual the first task is to filter these sites for those most appropriate to create relationships with or to approach for link building purposes.
Important here of course is the relevance of the site to the market your own website is in. The quality of the site might be assessed with a look through the existing forums and sub forums. Be wary of those full of spam comments and blocks of outbound links.
Citation Trust and Authority
It is also possible to use the very reliable INLINK metric to get a measure of the trust quality of the site. Other tools from within SEO powersuite can be used on these forums (or indeed any other site you might consider forming a link relationship with) to get a good idea of its overall metrics. Maybe run Website Auditor on it if you are unsure.
Forums offer link opportunities of various types. Obviously, there is the possibility of having a link embedded within one of your own forum posts.
Review Site Mentions
Getting good reviews on a review site offers two great opportunities for digital marketing advantage. You might be surprised how many review sites there are. You are probably familiar with “Trust Pilot” and “Trip Advisor”.
In practice we have found hundreds of other sites in all sorts of niches reviewing everything from new cars to golf equipment, software to mobile homes and everything in between.
After using the search function in Link Assistant as usual to find a selection of sites based on your keywords, it is possible to submit your service or product for review. In some cases, if you offer S.A.A.S services or down-loadables or perhaps any other type of digital product – it is possible to give these review sites a coupon, sample or taster.
To really take advantage of these your association with the review site will need to be advertised on the website you are promoting.
Perhaps a shout out such as; “Check us out and review us on Widget Planet” with a link to your product page on the review site.
This sort of link offers a second bonus as it connects directly with communities already likely to be searching for your product or service who, if you review well, are likely to find you whether you are ranking well in SEO terms or not.
While not the ideal solution for every website, being well reviewed can be a huge win for those that use this aspect of promotion well.
Link Submission forms and Directory Submission
Link Assistant has two categories for this type of links, however in practice in terms of link creation, and value, they are quite similar. Directory submission is useful for certain markets and only then if used in moderation on high quality directories with a good INLINK rank.
The set up is quite simple. Link Assistant will scan for directories based on the keywords you give it and return those that fit. In practice there are many thousands of directories, so using the filters and sort options from the Link Assistant interface will be of vital importance. Selecting only those with hi INLINK rank and that have categories that fit your own genre or market.
Almost all directories require that you fill in some details such as your own name, business name and contact details as well as the main “elevator” pitch for your website’s business. This need only be done once.
Link building seemed to be quite a technical aspect of SEO. Link Assistant made finding and understanding the value of the different link opportunities a breeze and reduced the busy work of SEO for us. A great, fully featured tool.
Topical Blogs
In addition to these avenues Link Assistant performs a couple of other vital functions that make the tool so valuable.
Topical blogs are probably best described as outreach rather than link building, although it is quite possible for this approach to lead to high quality links at some point.
A topical blog is one that is in your niche or market vertical (or perhaps horizontal) that is high traffic but does not as a rule allow commenting or guest posting. In short it is a great place to be, but “dropping a link” isn’t the approach that will work.
The method here is to use the contact form that almost all of these blogs have, or the email provided on the contact page to get in touch with the owner, webmaster or market manager on these sites and offer them a relationship. Some ideas for this are
- You will review their products on your site
- Selling their products as an affiliate
- Linking to their site from yours in a relevant article
- Promoting them to your email list
- A simple acknowledgement of their product or service as a user
In terms of value, over the medium and long term, it is no exaggeration to say that these relationships have been my own best route to market. Bringing opportunities, value, and customers from areas completely outside of traditional link building and direct marketing. If you have a good community online with some strong community websites, then outreach via topical blogs is a great long-term strategy. Make the effort and get in touch.
Competitor Backlink Profiles
This is huge.
While Link Assistant (part of SEO Powersuite) will find all sorts of links for you across a wide range of platforms, there are still going to be areas of the internet that your competitors utilise that you almost definitely have not thought of or would not consider as an option.
Tracking your competitor backlink profiles finds these links. Bringing up very comprehensive lists of as many links from each of your competitors as the application has found. Using the usual filtering for INLINK trust and citation metrics, it is then possible to sort these into link opportunities for your own website.
This is particularly useful if you are a new business with a new website in a well-established market. You will want to know what your competitors are doing, how they got to be as highly ranked as they are, and leverage some of this valuable insight into your own digital marketing plan.
Links Assistant Custom Search Options
For Power Users
Link Assistant offers you the option to put in your own search criteria for other websites or even CMS platforms and scrape the web for websites that meet the keyword or platform criteria. You can add special search operators to achieve more accurate results such as INURL:
This is the one area where the application might benefit from some proxies. Requesting search results from long lists of keywords with well-defined search criteria from Google reduces the number of requests that you can make before Google presents you with an “Abnormal search quantity detected” captcha.
If you are only searching for 5 or 10 keywords with no special search operators, you should be fine. If you are using these operators, then 5 might be the maximum before Google’s fair use kicks in and your searching is paused. To avoid this, proxies are an option.
It almost goes without saying that Link Assistant has a mature interface for entering proxies either individually (such as for using a VPN) of in a list for searching and rotates them and even emulates realistic human search behaviour to make them last as long as possible.
Again, this is for power users and not something many will do that often, but it is a powerful feature and Link Assistant supports it with a good interface and some very useful risk mitigation options.
Link Assistant 10 Minute Process Overview
Typical Admin Workflow for Link Assistant – Part of SEO Powersuite
Email Set Up
The first thing you will likely need to do if you are going to use Link Assistant for the long term is set up an email address for your outreach and communication emails. This is a simple task for anyone who has used Outlook, Mail or similar. Add the address itself. password and the ingoing and outgoing server details. In some instances, if using well known email providers such as Gmail or Yahoo the application will fill these in for you.
This does not have to be a unique email address, but for ease of use I create one for each project so it’s easy to see what the information flow is between myself and my p[potential relationship partners.
Select Your Keywords
Which keywords and phrases Link Assistant searches for might seem obvious, but it is an area where we perhaps see the most fundamental errors made that can impact on everything you do subsequently. Here are a list of 4 tips for getting this right.
To broad or too narrow? How large is your scope? If you are selling (for example) blue widgets, then the words “blue” and “widget” on their own will likely be of limited value. Blue is far too generic a term and unless you are selling a wider range of product options than widget on its own might open the competition you are up against to a much wider and stronger set of websites.
Do you want to compete for all widget selling websites or just those selling blue widgets? What is the value of someone on a general product search in your market niche? In short consider how wide you want to cast the net in terms of your product and service descriptions as you apply them to your keyword search
Local, National or International Reach?
How wide is your market? Do you provide your service or product locally, nationally or internationally? Appending your area to your search terms is a great way to hone in on a local market. Your product name on its own will meet with worldwide competition. Your product name “In Mytown” will narrow your competition substantially.
This also mimics what people do when they search. Put yourself in the shoes of someone looking on Google for your product. Is being local a consideration? Most trades operate locally as do many professional services.
Many deliverable items only deliver to their own region or country. When people search it is more common than not for the prospective customer to understand this and append their locality to their search term. Take advantage of this and search for keywords suffixed or prefixed with your service area.
Target your Customers not your Competitors
The number one mistake I see. Website owners targeting their competitors. Plumbers targeting phrases such a as “Plumbers in Mytown”. While this is not a completely useless phrase, it isn’t what people search for.
In practice when someone is using a search engine for a plumber they have a problem to solve. “Boiler repair” or “Fix leaky pipe” or “No hot water” and the big win in this instance “Emergency” or “24 hour service”. The Google users searching with these terms are customers. They want your product or service now. Searches for “Plumber” or “Electrician” are what we call window shopper phrases.
Scaling up with multiple clients for no extra on cost and the ability to send those clients superbly presented self branded reports marks Link Assistant
Window Shopping Vs Buying Phrases?
Link Assistant (part of SEO Powersuite) will return websites on whatever criteria you give it. So, avoid phrases that have no commercial value to begin with. Rumour has it that, at one-time, General Motors used to bid in PPC for the word “car”. Until they discovered that well over 99% of people searching for that term just wanted nice pictures of cars, a manual to fix a car, a model car or were students researching the history of the automobile.
There was little or no value for GM in bidding for the term “car” despite it being an exact and precise description of their product.
Better to be very specific and use perhaps more keywords “Used people carrier”, “2018 Diesel Coupe” These terms are almost definitely being used by potential customers. They detail the product and have what we call a buying imperative.
“Used” for example is almost exclusively a suffix for second had car dealers and almost everyone knows this. When suffixed to a make or model of a car there is a strong likelihood that the searcher is looking to buy or is at least at some point on the consideration process towards buying.
When adding you terms for Link Assistant to return your potential link lists, consider the commercial value of them
Scan for Prospects
The scan process itself can take a while. If you have added more than 10 key phrases and several link types to scan for consider using the human emulation options within Link Assistant
From the top menu select
Preferences – Search Safety Settings – Human Emulation
Consider adding delays between search queries. The more searches you are making the longer the delays. This prevents Google from being bogged down with queries and if scraping from 3rd party sites it’s good manners not to hit the site with too many requests. Be a little patient, allow perhaps an hour for large sets of search results to come through.
It all happens automatically so you can be doing other things while Link Assistant does its stuff. It’s a light weight application so as long as your PC is not particularly under powered you should be able to continue to use it for other tasks while Link Assistant does its stuff.
Filter for Best Value
The “Prospect Quality” tab at the top of the main Link Assistant work window shows you all the websites gathered for your project. Clicking on any column will sort by that column. In most instances, if you have searched for several link types, there will likely be many thousands of potential link partners listed here. It’s time to filter those down to the most valuable.
INLINK Rank. Link Assistant provides its own proprietary trust metric called INLINK rank. Be default this is the second column on the screen (just to the right of the target URL). An number her above 50 is very good and most above 30 are acceptable link targets.
Domain Age / Indexed in Google. Taken together these form a second line of verification in terms of assessing the trust level of a site. A website over 5 years old that is indexed in Google is likely to be trustworthy. It’s been around for a while and not done anything in that time to upset any Google penalty filters.
Alexa Rank. The Alexa toolbar can be installed in some browsers and reports the browsers website visits to Alexa who use this simple data to compile a list of most visited sites. However, so few people use this toolbar, and those that do tend to be very tech oriented, therefore tech and hardware sites tend to be over reported in Alexa and some niches, despite being popular are under reported. However, an Alexa Rank under 250,000 (the lower the better in Alexa – with the most popular site in the world being “1” in their rankings) can be assumed to have very high traffic levels, and therefore worthy of consideration.
There are columns that show you the social media popularity of the site. Again, a good indicator of the brand or site reach.
Clicking on the chequer board icon on the top right bring up another list of criteria you can odd to the overview. The websites META data, anchor text, their inbound link quantity plus the data you discover yourself. Email address, “notes” and many other pieces of information useful for filtering and then administering your contact campaigns with each site.
Link Assistant Discount and Free Trial
Use the links on this page to have a download your 1 month free trial of any or all tools from the SEO Powersuite
We also offer an exclusive 10% discount on any purchase of SEO Powersuite through these links.
You won’t find this software at a better price anywhere else.
Link Assistant Review
The Value of a Varied and Contextual Link Profile
As a side note. A good link profile has various factors that identify it as strong and powerful. A good link profile cannot (and should not) be built with speed as the main consideration. It has links surrounded by content on good reliably and trustworthy 3rd party sites.
The sites that link to yours will likely be on many different CMS platforms as well as hand-built HTML / CSS sites.
The content that surrounds your links on these sites will be strong and relevant to your niche or product.
A good link profile is used as a conduit for traffic from the hosting sites. It isn’t just “link juice” it’s a way for people to travel to your website who have discovered you while reading or researching elsewhere.
There is rarely any such thing as a “bad link”. As long as you aren’t linked to from sites full of scams and viruses – almost all links are of some befit. There is however such a thing as a “bad link profile” Your profile is the sum of all your links.
- Are most of them relevant?
- Do they come from a mix of other good sites?
- Are they surrounded by great content?
- Were they created over a reasonable time span?
There are other considerations such as anchor text variation, follow and no-follow tags etc. but if you take care to control the aspects that Link Assistant allows you to control, the rest of your link profile will look after itself
Link Assistant Enables Cost Effective Scaling and White Label Reporting
Here at Yourmetalife we look at the products, services and methods that would suit individuals with more than one site or agencies who are managing the sites or digital marketing efforts of several clients.
In these cases affordability and the ability to scale efforts quickly without incurring disproportionate costs.
Link Assistant (part of the SEO Powersuite) comes highly recommended as one of the tools an agency or serious lone marketer can use to scale effectively. For a one-off fee the Enterprise version of all the tools in the SEO Powersuite come with White Label reporting as standard.
The ability to remove the Link Assistant brand and add your own. To print off beautifully formatted reports as plain text documents, PDF’s or even upload them via FTP as HTML files.
Comparison to Other Digital Marketing Applications
There are no extra costs with any tools in the SEO Powersuite for adding more clients or projects. You can run and control as many as you need. Saving each to its own file to be opened and worked on as you need to.
This is in contrast to just about every other serious digital marketing tool that has costs that scale with each new profile or project added.
For example, some popular link management tools offer a free or low cost single user experience. The catch being, as soon as you need to service many clients across multiple profiles the agency or enterprise level costs scale up out of all proportion. I t is common for a single project license to be under $20 and an agency solution to service 10 or more clients to costs thousands of dollars per month.
Cost Effective and Scale-able
Every tool in the SEO powersuite offers effectively unlimited scalability., Add a project, add a client, and keep going. Save each project separately and work on as required.
Many of the tools in the suite are also ideal to create outreach documents to attract new clients. Simple and quick to run it might, for example, be possible to run a set of reports for a business you were looking to contact. Upload them in HTML form to a page, then contact that business by phone or mail with the results of your research (white labelled with your own branding of course) offering to fix any issues found. You have positioned your own competency up front, provided insight into the issues the potential client faces such as competition levels, website issues, social media presence and offering to fix or improve their status.
In practice this offers a massively better response rate than the generic proposition email, and with SEO Powersuite, preparing these reports is done in minutes, costs next to nothing and with the Enterprise version of the tools presents your brand competency directly to your prospective clients.
Preparing Elegant Client Reports
Once you have clients – or need to understand your own websites progress over time. These same reports provide the backbone of your client reporting cycle. Regular reports to your client base – normally monthly – is perhaps the number one factor in client retention. Having a tool set that reports the progress in terms of link building, SEO positions, website issues and fixes, competition levels and social media presence and activity at the press of a few buttons is a huge time saver.
In short Link Assistant – Part of the SEO Powersuite, along with the other applications in the suite offers serious marketers and agencies a hugely powerful tool set with many uses for a low cost that none of the competition can approach and as such comes highly recommended.
Scaling up with multiple clients for no extra on cost and the ability to send those clients superbly presented self branded reports marks Link Assistant out as a clear winner for us.
Free Trial and Exclusive Discount
Link Assistant Download Free Trial or Get Our Best Discount
Yourmetalife has the best Link Assistant Free Trial and Discount deal you will find anywhere on the internet. Building safe, reliable links that benefit your site in SEO is one of the most important activities for any site that wants to rank highly for commercial terms in the search engines. You can download Link Assistant free here from the links on this page.
Why Link Assistant Download?
Do you run several sites? Would you prefer to export your data or find more than 1000 link sites? Then the Link Assistant Discount is for you.10% off either the professional or Enterprise versions of this best in class, white hat link building tool. You won’t find a better deal anywhere on the internet. The free download lets you try the power of this best-in-class digital marketing tool at no cost to yourself. No obligation, no catch. Download today.
Link Assistant Free Trial
Absolutely free, and so much value. This isn’t just a sales hook, this trial allows you to set up a project and discover up to 1000 potential link sites from across the internet. Using a huge number of platforms from guest blogging, review sites, forums, voucher and discount sites. Link Assistant comes with all the tools you need to not only find these potential links, but also to action them and achieve a world class, safe, ethical link profile with the minimum of effort.
With SEO Powersuite’s inbuilt URL appraisal metric “InLink” rank, you can tell the quality of the links you are looking at. Sort the potential link partners however you need. Check for keyword relevance, see the meta data of the sites you are considering linking from. IN short make the most powerful backlinks possible with all the information you need to make the best choices and all the functionality you need to make safe effective back link building a simple and transparent task.
With a full feature set, this trial is yours to use with no limitations on time. Imagine the possibilities of catapulting your website to the top of Google using a free, no obligation trial of such a powerful SEO tool.
Link Assistant Version Comparisons
The Yourmetalife Difference
Yourmetalife offers the best discount available anywhere on the internet for this and all other tools in SEO Powersuite.
We also offer superb 3rd party support. While the designers of this tool (part of SEO Powersuite) have been in the business for many years and have a great history of updating their tools regularly, adding new features and providing superb support, Yourmetalife take the position of end user advocates.
We have a history of working closely with digital marketing application developers and communicating with end users. We are happy to answer questions and pass on suggestions. If you know our history on demondemon and similar sites, you’ll appreciate how closely we work with our own community to ensure the best user experience.
A free trial, the best discount and unique level of third party support. That’s the difference Yourmetalife makes.
About
Paul Rone-Clarke is Digital Marking Director with Gambit Nash. A creative agency based in the stunning rural countryside of Worcestershire.
Starting in digital marketing (long before it was called digital marketing) in 1996 with small jobs for local companies. Promoting a local shoe shop, a large catalogue firm and several small businesses working alongside his time in education, as a very mature student and working as a Production Planner and Senior Manager with great companies such as Bosch and Superform Aluminium.
If you are interested, Superform make the super-heated aluminium body panels for cars such as Aston Martin and Morgan.
Deciding to start Yourmetalife in 2009 and creating a successful brand alongside the more important issue of happy and well serviced clients it became apparent after 5 good years of growth that without some level of automation, outsourcing or the introduction of complementary skill sets, further scaling up of the business was going to be a difficult process.
Gambit Nash
In 2015 Gambit Nash was formed as a creative agency bringing together graphic design, coding, net and server infrastructure, project management and print under one roof. This allowing collaboration between various members of the team, the capital to grow and the ability for each team member to concentrate on their core activities.
This site is part of the Yourmetalife group
Gambit Nash, and Yourmetalife use the products featured on this page extensively for client acquisition, digital marketing and client communication via the excellent reporting and export options. The choice of SEO Powersuite was after several weeks of consultation and assessment of the cost benefits of a whole range of products.
As such SEO Powersuite – in particular the Enterprise versions of the tools – and each of the four applications that make up its total come highly recommended for professional and agency use. The Professional version is a product I have used myself with Yourmetalife for many years prior to that. The software is well supported, frequently updated with new features and by some way the best value of any other set of DM tools I have looked at.