As link builders, we rack our brains trying to figure out how to get “big wins,” and I am no different. Nothing gets me more amped than earning 20 linking root domains from high domain authority sites with some great link bait. However, sometimes we can get so focused on the big wins, that we forget about the low hanging fruit.

I love the idea of scraping…. but I just can’t do it. I’ve sat through presentations from Annie Cushing and Eppie Vojt, and I still can’t do it. I’ve had Ethan Lyon sit me down, and try and teach me – but it doesn’t sink in. I don’t do much intense data collection, all I want to do is scrape search engine results in mass. That’s why I use Link Prospector.

Update: 10/28/2013 – A lot has changed, I would not try this strategy anymore. Use at your own risk.

I have a tool crush on Screaming Frog. I consider it one of the keys to scalability and I don’t know what I would do without it. Dan Sharp deserves a medal because his tool has saved SEOs countless hours of manual work. Screaming Frog can be used for a variety of things, but my new favorite use is for identifying internal link building opportunities.

Building links on sites that publish content on a regular basis is easier than having someone change hard coded content. Blogs need to publish on a regular basis or they will lose their audience.

Content Gap Analysis can be an intricate and exhaustive process. But with a little excel work and a few SEMrush exports, you can do it in a matter of minutes. It’s almost summer, so let’s use grilling blogs as the example:

When you start working with a new client, sometimes you have to educate their internal marketing teams about the value of link building. If done correctly, there is potential to create a link building machine inside the core of a savvy marketing department.It’s key to educate your clients moving forward, but what about all that press from before SEO became a priority? There may be sites out there that have interviewed your clients, hosted them for events, written about their products – and they aren’t all linking over.

A site I’ve been working with took a rankings and traffic hit from the 12/13 phantom update. I spent a lot of time trying to get to the root of the issue, analyzing what exactly this non-update was targeting. Eventually I realized I was never going to figure this out – and I said, “screw it, the site just needs to be better, the damage is done and it’s time to pick up the pieces.”

I have a lot of tools in my SEO toolbelt, but I only consider a few of them to be absolutely necessary – Link Prospector from Garrett French is one of them. LP takes all the grunt work out of advanced queries and scraping SERPs. But just like when you prospect by hand, you are going to find some garbage that you will need to remove from your data set.

Everyone makes typos, including respected webmasters and journalists. If you are link building for brands you need to be two things – scalable and efficient. You can’t spend your time emailing individual sites who may or may not be interested in your content – you need wins. You can either create engaging content and make people want to link to you… or if you are a big enough brand you can find the people who meant to link to you.

A few months ago, Rand Fishkin wrote a post about the benefits of buying a blog. It's a tactic I have become a big fan of – it's effective, efficient, and scalable. By purchasing/financing a blog you can work hand-in-hand with an established site that already has an engaged readership and a social following.

There are a lot of tools out there for link building, but few provide reports as actionable as Link Prospector. I’ve been using the product since shortly after its release and I am quick to champion it as my must have tool.The tool utilizes advanced queries to find actionable linking opportunities. Instead of scraping Google results for hours on end and using SEO Tools for Excel to get Page Rank, this tool can do all the work for you.

I am a link builder at heart; it’s what I love to do. On the reverse side, I find citation building to be one of the most boring tasks in the industry. Link building is strategic and tactical – citation building is well… not. Which is why this strategy was created – to take some of the monotony out of citation building.