As a seasoned SEO professional I have found that there are so many ways to find and obtain new back-links, but in this post I am going to share a little bit about an extremely amazing new tool launched by SEOmoz.com – Their Open Site Explorer Tool!

The Open Site Explorer is a Link Popularity Checker and Backlink Analysis Tool! So if you’ve got a major competitor you are going up against, why not get all the link data you can about their site. Just enter their URL and check out where they are getting their links from with the highest authority.  Once you’ve got the list, you can go through one by one and use your own personal SEO tactics to try and obtain a link from the same site.

What I normally will do is first off see if there is a number I can call. Getting a-hold of the site owner or webmaster is always the best route to take. You can directly negotiate with them, and explain why your site would be a great resource to his or her sites visitors. If there is no phone number, see if you can find an email address. Send them an email, but make it look catchy and not spammy. We all know what to do with those random emails we call crap, so make the subject line look good, and your body not just another “link request”.

If there is no contact information for the site, and you really want a link up there, you can always try to entice the site to look at you. Post on your personal blog about them, or use some social sites like Twitter or Facebook to attract their attention. If they are an active site, you can be pretty sure someone will notice. – Almost like I am trying to get the attention of SEOmoz by writing a post about their super amazing Open Site Explorer tool. Maybe I will get randfish to post a comment lol.

Now there is a Free and Pro edition, so if your aim is to just get links and not care the authority or value of those links, than go with the free version which is available to anyone who visits the site. However, for those of us that focus on high quality back-links, you more than likely want to know some authority statistics and link data about each site, so to have it all in one place is pretty ideal for pro users. -> Go Pro!

Hope this helps a few people out by introducing a great tool if you did not already know about it! All your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated! – Utah SEO Pros

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