Many of us have come to appreciate the fact that link building, to create inbound links to our web sites, is an effective way to increase our web sites popularity on the Search Engines. Not only do inbound links bring new visitors to your sites, search engines like Google treat inbound links as a positive signal that your site has a good level of importance in your specified area.

What is the best way to increase your inbound links?

Develop more inbound links with other sites that contain content relevant to that of your web sites content. This is easier said than done. Developing links with other web sites is an ongoing effort that takes a lot of research and time.

First, you must first use search engines to determine which web sites contain relevant content for linking purposes. Just the huge number of search engines on the Internet today makes this a daunting task. This takes your efforts away from actually developing more valuable content … or relaxing by the pool. Then there is the request for reciprocal links, the waiting and then posting the links to each site.

Even after you have established inbound links, how do you know if the other sites are still linking to your site? You must occasionally go and visit each site to determine if your link is there. A more effective use of your time could be spent by using well established SEO tools for finding web sites with relevant content.

We have identified a few tools to assist you in developing those inbound links and make your SEO work for you.

The first tool that caught my attention was LinkAssistant. This software tool automated many of the time intensive tasks and cut my workload significantly. With LinkAssistant I could:

• Find and select link partners out of hundreds of relevant, high-quality sites
• Generate web directories of relevant sites for inclusion on my own site
• Create personalized emails to web site owners (LinkAssistant can actually find the web site owners email address in a matter of seconds)
• Quickly verify if my link partners are still linking back to my web site
• Reveal black-hat SEO techniques your link partners might be turning against you
• Group and manage my links into categories so I could use them on various landing pages which were specific to that category

These were just the features that provided me with instant benefit in making better use of my time. What I wasn’t expecting, were some of the other added features that makes this tool very useful for ensuring that your SEO is working for you. LinkAssistant is able to track my web sites rankings across 370 search engines. So if something isn’t working, I can instantly see what I need to fix to rank better.

It is easy to see how this tool can catapult your website to the top of search engine listings through Google-tested on-site optimization. You can learn more about it here.

The other web site SEO tool that impressed me was the suite of online tools at SEOmoz.org. They provide access to SEO guides and offer loads of SEO tools to help you to become an SEO expert.

SEOmoz.org is a site that caters to the SEO beginner as well as the SEO/SEM Professional by offering tools, guides and a custom question and answer marketplace to help you understand how SEO works.

We are still evaluating a couple of other products:

• SEO Elite which guarantees a top 5 placement in Google in less than 30 days
• CyberLink Pro - They can build 1,000s of links to your site for a small fee

Want to know what others did to make their websites rank higher? Click here.