If you read this post (comparing data link providers) rob kerry from ayima wrote, you’d probably already know it was an awesome post.   For those who didn’t read it, let me give you some inside information – it’s an awesome post.

What it’s missing though, is that you can actually utilize all the data providers using 1 tool.  It’s called linkresearchtools.com or LRT for short.  I don’t get paid a nickel for referrals, but you’re welcome LRT.

Instead of going on and on about what the tool does, and pretend like I work there, I’ll do you one better.  I’ll first, tell you what it does shortly and lastly I’ll give you an actual report I made.

What I like that it can do:

It allows you to import links and return whatever data you want.  Literally, as much as you want.

What I did with it:

So, what I did was I imported a subset (2,000) of the Top 10,000 websites in Ayima’s index, sorted by authority.  What I did was categorized the links using LRT and put it in a filter and now you can use this data to evaluate any prospects for potential links.

Basically now you can filter these sites by category or sitetype.  Blog, News, Directory, Computers, Forum, Portals, Social Networking, Reference, Shopping etc.

You can download my filtered data file here of those links.

Obviously these are Tier-1 sites, and it’s not easy regardless of the site’s category to build a partnership and get a link – but you never know.  Want to even speed up the process even more?  Try Citation Labs “The Contact Finder”.

Rinse and repeat.

You get to see things this.

The number of SEO tools are endless and often times get lost in the mix. Tools come and go but there are few that actually get used often. Without giving you the opportunity to say TL;DR, and boring you with a horrible meme, here.we.go.

 ”The sCrappiest Plugin Ever”

Basically I wanted a quick and dirty way to see the mozCast weather, and SEOMoz blog entries on the fly. I utilized a super horrible hacky way of doing this, but I love it.

1. Install the “Create your Own” Chrome Extension.
2. Right click the extension, and under the HTML tab add:

<br /> <iframe src="http://www.coreyeulas.com/mozcast.html" width="320" height="400px"></iframe><br />

(Remember if you want to click a link, hold CTRL before you click on it.)

QuickDiff (click here)

Whenever I (or a technical person) wants to modify the HTML or introduce a major change to a page I always want to make sure something isn’t removed. Whether it’s a removal of Google Analytics snippet or a missed canonical tag, you never know what could happen! The “QuickDiff” web based ’tool’ makes this a breeze.

Google Similar Pages (here)

If you are a link builder and you stumble on a page that you like but need “show me more like this” button, Google Similar Pages is a fast way of making your life a bit easier.  You just install, and click it.  It’s that simple.  Here is an example of when you are on Kickstarter… it’s pretty good.

ChangeDetection (check it out)

If you are in an enterprise enviornment, or a super curious internet marketer you always want to know when a page changes. Perhaps you just want to keep an eye of the changes that happen on a major eCommerce site for ideas of what they did or didn’t do to improve conversions. ChangeDetection helps monitor and notify you when something on a page changes.

Semantic inspector (here)

Schema is important.  What is schema you ask?  Schema.org says it best – “HTML tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.”

If you aren’t utilizing it, you are missing out.  This tool lets you check out websites that are doing it correctly (or incorrectly), including your own.  It only appears in your Chrome toolbar whenever schema markup is in use.   Totally lost?  Read this.

Google Chrome User-Agent Change

I found this by mistake, and love it.  Let’s say you don’t want to use Adobe BrowserLab and you’re feeling like you want to view your site as a different user-agent.  Let’s say your exploring mobile SEO and you want a quick glimpse into what your competitors are doing (or aren’t).

Right click the background of any page your viewing, hit inspect element, and on the bottom right click the settings gear. Select the user-agent tab and boom – you have the option of overriding your current version and picking IE, FF, iOS (iPad or iPhone) and more.

Bonus:

On an iPad and want to view source, because you’re a super SEO nerd and do this sort of thing on the beach when you’re on an iPad? Just add this to your favorites and click on it when you are on the page you want to see the code for:

javascript:var%20sourceWindow%20%3D%20window.open%28%27about%3Ablank%27%29%3B%20%0Avar%20newDoc%20%3D%20sourceWindow.document%3B%20%0AnewDoc.open

Google site operators have always been something I quickly rely on in a pinch.  When I’m shopping online for deals, doing SEO, or looking for an answer to a question that nobody can correctly answers, Google operators is my friend.

Using the “site:” operator you can search a whole site for something specific.  If you do site:ticketmaster.com you can find anything you want. If you want to search in a specific folder, even better.  If that folder is where they store all the promos, you’ve hit the jackpot.  You also have the option to laser target for a keyword, or even tell Google to not show you something.

Here is an example:

What you’re doing here is searching the promo directory of ticketmaster and your saying “don’t show me anything that says 2010″ and look for any page that mentions knicks.  You may find a page like I did: “New York Knicks Regular Season Ticket Pre-Sale for Suite Holders”. 

You can use these Google advanced operators to decide if the item you are purchasing is the best possible deal.  For example, let’s say you want to find the best possible deal on ZAGG products, you just follow these simple instructions:

1) Click the link from their recent newsletter.

2) Grab the URL (delete everything following the last “/”) .. we get: http://www.zagg.com/j/promo/

3) Go to Google and type: “site:http://www.zagg.com/j/promo/” without the quotes.

4) Use this as a tool to a) find out the best possible deal b) what you should be willing to pay for an item.

PRO TIP 1:

If you want to find the most recent deals, use Google’s “Search Tools” to sort by date to find the most recent deals.

PRO TIP 2:

Did you just realize one of your sites promos appear in Google search results?  Simply add <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> after the <head>.  You shouldn’t disallow the folder in robots.txt, because if I don’t see it in the Google index, I’ll look there next.