Ontolo Quick-Start Guide
Welcome to the Ontolo Toolset!
Before you get started, know that setting up Ontolo is not like other link building/SEO tools.
(This is a good thing...)
Your account will take another couple of minutes to get set up. (It's all sorts of fancy database stuff for you.) In the meantime....
Walk with us as we guide you through setting up a campaign and searching for prospects in your prospect database.
Ontolo works differently than other SEO or link building tools. In short, we create your own, customizable link prospect database. We don't have one huge database that you search on, just yours, which is fully customized by you, for you.
How the Ontolo Toolset Works
- Setup your campaigns using the Campaign Manager. (Details in the next step of this guide.)
- Then, each night, we find new link prospects for you, crawl them, add them to your searchable database, then collect PageRank, SEOmoz, and Alexa metrics for each.
- Finally, all you have to do is then use the various tools to find your top link prospects, making Prospecting Phrase changes along the way as your campaigns evolve.
Setting up Link Types & Prospecting Phrases is the most important step of all.
Prospecting can not begin until you do this!
- Set up your campaign following the steps in the Campaign Manager documentation. It's pretty straightforward, but giving it a quick review right now is a good idea.
- Then read through how to best craft your prospecting phrases. This is the most important part of your link building campaign. We suggest reading this multiple times.
- Finally, brainstorm and configure all of your campaign's Link Types, Priorities and Prospecting Phrases in the Campaign Manager (You'll see a link there at the end of this guide.).
Note: New link prospects are added overnight. If you are just setting up your account, you'll see your first batch of new prospects in your database tommorrow.
3 Ways to Quickly Find Relevant & Valuable Link Prospects
- Prospects Search: This is the main prospects search form that you will likely use 90%+ of the time. With it, you can search on the full text of every prospect in your database, just like with Google, but you can also specify various Value ranges such as PageRank, Domain Authority, mozRank and more.
- Export Link Targets: When you setup your Link Types, you can also choose to have notifications emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis whenever we find prospects that meet your relevance and value targets. Or, you can come straight to the Export Link Targets form and export them from here as well.
- Find Prospects Linking to Competitors: This is commonly the shortest prospect lists you will have, but they may also be the most valuable. Here, you can search and return only prospects that link to at least one competitor. The result is a list of highly-qualified link prospects that have already demonstrated that they'll like to companies like yours.
Any time you want additional help from someone at Ontolo, simply click the "Support" link at the top-right in every page's header. That takes you to our documentation forums and help desk. If you'd like to submit a ticket, simply click "Submit a Request" in the Help Desk navigation.
In-App Support:
- "How-To": This link appears in red at the top right of each tool. Clicking it will open a documentation page in your current window that walks you through use cases and more.
See it up there in the right? Go ahead. Click it. - "Steps": This link also appears in red at the top right of each tool. Clicking it will walk you through, step-by-step, each of the inputs and outputs of that tool.
See up there in the right as well? Go ahead. Click it, too. - Mouse-Over Help: Some of the settings used in The Ontolo Toolset might be unclear at times. We've done our best to identify those and to provide mouse-over tooltips for that input. Here's an example from the Prospect Search tool.
