The Linking Matters report contains a number of references to online resources within each section, these are all also collected within the Web references section.
The links below are not necessarily contained within the report, but are definitely useful sites for beginners wanting to understand what linking strategy is.
www.ericward.com
Eric Ward, self proclaimed Link Mensch, has a very useful collection of articles on Link Popularity. He founded the Web's first service for announcing and linking Web sites back in 1994 (NetPost) and is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, Microsoft.com, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, and The Weather Channel.
www.clickz.com
Clickz.com is an outstanding resource on all aspects of online marketing and advertising. The site publishes new articles every working day and has a huge archive. Includes articles on linking from Eric Ward, Paul J Bruemmer and Danny Sullivan.
www.searchenginewatch.com
Danny Sullivan publishes the most comprehensive web site on search engines available. Visitors have access to a wealth of articles covering a multitude of search-related topics. Also has a monthly newsletter, sent out to more than 130,000 subscribers. A paid-for subscribers section provides yet more information on virtually every single search engine out there - it's great value.
www.Links Manager.com
Links Manager is an application service that completely manages a website�s links pages. There is no software to download and install and the list of features is very impressive. All links swaps generated through the system are manually initiated and approved by humans one link at a time.
While Links Manager does not search for link partners per se, it also powers www.LinkPartners.com a free directory of quality sites that are keen to trade reciprocal links. In the test run for this review, LinkPartners certainly returned some quality sites that would be of interest in a linking campaign.
The service features an initial free 30-day trail period after which you pay a monthly fee depending on your usage of the system.
www.rankwrite.com
Rankwrite is a search engine optimization email newsletter and SEO reference website featuring answers to questions about achieving high search engine rankings, successful copywriting for search engines, directory submissions, and the latest SEO news and alerts.
www.promotionbase.com
PromotionBase is part of SitePoint.com, a huge resource for webmasters focusing on web site design, promotion, submission, positioning, marketing and profitability.
www.marketzone.net
Search engine marketing and optimization resources, applications, and tools for those interested in promoting their web site within search results.
www.linkagexpress.com
LinkageXpress offers keenly priced link building services. Campaigns are carried out individually by hand with no automatic submissions.
www.alliance-link.com
Alliance Link offers search engine marketing, link building campaigns and affiliate recruitment to generate traffic for clients. Special rates for non-profits.
www.web-marketing-tutorial.com
A simple-to-follow road map for small/medium businesses to understand and implement major Web/Online Marketing elements on their Web sites. Detailed how-to's with regular updates and additions.
Implementing an effective linking strategy takes time and effort but the workload can be reduced significantly by using software specifically designed to manage a linking strategy. Such software can be a great help, particularly for larger projects and it is worthwhile becoming familiar with how they work.
However, they do not do your thinking for you - you still need to find, evaluate and approach potential target links. So use your chosen software to save time, and use the time you save to improve and polish your strategy.
Arelis
Arelis is probably the most popular tool in use for automatically generating link partners. It handles the whole process from finding sites, emailing the webmasters and adding them automatically to a reciprocal link page. Primarily designed with reciprocal links in mind, it has features unnecessary to a genuine link strategy.
On the positive side, for what it is designed to do, it does well. It keeps track of every site you send a request to, allows you to change the status of sites and generally keep track of what stage your link requests is. This is nothing that couldn't be done by an organised person and a spreadsheet, but if you want automation, Arelis may be for you.
Zeus
Zeus is the second main reciprocal link program is use today. Unlike Arelis it finds potential link partners through it's own web robot rather than using search engines, though both seem to require a lot of tuning with keyword selection to get appropiate sites. It also manages emailing the sites, and offers similar options for both customising and using templates in link request emails.
Link Survey
Link Survey is an excellent, low-cost tool for helping to manage a linking campaign. The software allows you to analyse your own and your competitor's sites and helps you easily build target lists. These can then be reviewed and exported to text, HTML or Excel.
WebFerret
Free and enhanced paid-for software tool which simultaneously searches nine of the Internet's top search engines and produces an index of the results showing each page's title, URL, and the search engine in which it was found. It is useful for finding potential link partners by searching for links to competitors pages and outputting the URLs to a HTML file, which may be processed by 2BPop (shown below).
2BPop
When combined with WebFerret's search results, this provides a free solution for automatically generating email adresses from webpages and sending link requests to potential partners. It is comparable to Arelis or Zeus in it's email functionality, though misses some of the useful management tools.
LinkPopularity.com
Linkpopularity.com provides a quick and easy way to check your link popularity across three search engines - AltaVista, Google and HotBot. You can also set up a free monthly monitoring service.
Check Your Link Popularity
Free Software that's ideal for monitoring multiple competitor or sympathetic sites. Just enter the URLs and you'll get results in a single table covering AlltheWeb, AltaVista, AOL Search, HotBot and MSN Search.
Support Link Consultancy Check your site's link popularity with this free tool.
Axandra link popularity check sites
Axandra (the makers of Arelis) provide a comprehensive list of online link popularity check sites and tools.
WebmasterGate, Webmaster Resources Directory - Tools and information to build, maintain and promote your website.
Academy of Web Specialists Professional search engine marketing training and Web site optimization education optimization software.
