Link building is an integral part of SEO. Major search engines like Google give weightage to what sort of websites link back to you and according to the authority they enjoy (Page Rank) they add positive points to your rankings.
There can be automatic systems for link building but normally they are not very fruitful and 99% of the cases they might even prove counter-productive because the search engines might think that you are trying to spam your way around. So the best way of getting inbound links to your website is doing it manually, personally approaching webmasters and bloggers and present to them mutual link building opportunities.
But how to find the right webmasters and bloggers? It will be tedious to search every day (because link building is a regular exercise). Neil Patel in his latest SEOMoz blog post suggests using various free alerts services available on the Internet to find the niche you’re looking for. That’s a very good suggestion, because people who would like to link to you must be talking about either you or your field of expertise.
Haven’t used alerts yet? Many regular bloggers use alerts to get blogging ideas and news alerts and one of the most used alerts services is Google alerts. Just go to the website, and enter the search term or the expression for which you would like to receive alerts. You enter the expression and the e-mail and whenever Google finds content satisfying the expression you have submitted, it mails you the link. You can visit that link and access the content associated with that expression.
As you can see above, and as Neil has amply explained, there are various modes of search terms and expressions you can use in order to receive just the alerts you’re looking for. In the very near future we will have a blog post on how to create advanced search criteria in order to refine your results on Google.
Since lots of conversation regarding your subject and also your brand takes place on social media and social networking websites, you can also create alerts on Twitter and Facebook.
If you use services like Hootsuit and TweetDeck to manage your Twitter account you can easily create a separate column dedicated to your search term and whenever somebody posts an update around that search term, it also appears in your column.
You can get more information in the actual blog post at SEOMoz.
