{"id":137492,"date":"2019-09-03T15:17:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T15:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/?p=137492"},"modified":"2020-01-28T18:21:37","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T18:21:37","slug":"tips-to-qualify-link-building-prospects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2019\/09\/03\/tips-to-qualify-link-building-prospects\/","title":{"rendered":"Tips to qualify link building prospects in minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Link builders know that qualifying prospects is extremely time-consuming, and a tool that helps you find the relevant prospects fast is gold. This guide will show you a simple method to obtain a list of relevant prospects in several minutes rather than days, or weeks of manual work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You either have time, either money, usually, or maybe you are short of both of them, which is a very challenging situation, yet not hopeless. However, these two resources, money and time are related and one way to increase your profit is to actually make many things in less time. The faster you solve problems, the more clients you can help, the more customers you get, well basically, you make more money. This is why doing things by hand is not an option if you consider\u00a0SEO\u00a0more than just a hobby; you simply waste too much time this way. So you will have to use some tools, and two very powerful pieces of software for getting and processing large amounts of data are\u00a0Screaming Frog\u00a0and\u00a0Microsoft Excel.<\/p>\n

If you are a freelancer or a small SEO agency you should know that Screaming Frog is not a cheap solution. The software itself is not very expensive (not expensive at all, actually), but to use it at its full potential \u2013 parsing huge websites, or lists of URLs requires quite a powerful PC configuration. However, you can eat an elephant one bite at a time, as they say, so here is a guide that helps you know “How to crawl large websites using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider<\/a>“. A free alternative is\u00a0Xenu\u2019s Link Sleuth, but this cute little program is getting older, and older as it hasn\u2019t been updated for almost a decade. However, Xenu is free and fast. As for Excel, some quite decent free alternatives are\u00a0Google Sheets\u00a0and\u00a0Open Office.<\/p>\n

Handling Excel sheets with hundred of rows also requires a powerful PC. A computer with a generous amount of memory, and a vigorous processor that’ll allow you to run Screaming Frog properly and also sort and filter huge amounts of data in Excel. So, if you plan to take your SEO business serious, you will have to spend some money to save time, but it is going to be a great investment in the long run. In case you want to have a PC well configured for Screaming Frog, here is the\u00a0recommended hardware<\/a>\u00a0for it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, let\u2019s get back to our main topic \u2013 “How to qualify link building prospects fast?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

1. Searching for relevant websites\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

First things first, in order to get what you want, you actually have to know what you need. So what are you looking for?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say we want to start a “broken links” type link building campaign for a website about aircraft modeling. In this case, we will try to find some relevant pages from relevant websites.<\/p>\n

But what does “relevant” mean actually? Well, for you it means that the ideal prospects should be websites containing pages with:<\/p>\n