I liked the article that Jennifer Laycock wrote last week on Using Blog Search Engines to Build Links and if someone has the time to do the research - you can probably com up with a lot of good, fresh links that way.

In fact, I'll probably do it myself as I took that job I was talking about the other day under Scruples about Online Reputation Management; I'll work on this as a joint project with my friend Sebastian.  When I spoke to my clients, and weighing everything out - it seemed like the right thing to do - but we're still determining the details.

"…

• Type a keyword or phrase into the search box that's related to the topic of your web site
• Select "in blog posts" from the drop down box
• Run a search

If there are a lot of results you can choose to narrow them down to include the most popular and respected blogs by selecting "with a lot of authority" from the drop-down box. A new search will rerun automatically."

Jennifer shows you exactly what you have to do - thing is - it take time.  I'm not saying it takes a ton of time - but if your going to really look at the links you cull this way - perhaps only a percentage of them are going to actually be usable and on topic (under closer examination).

The next crop of SEO Tools, the one's I keep wishing for but simply don't exist yet - require a semantic analysis of the content of the sites (which Technorati is doing, somewhat) in relation to the site your trying to get links to (which Technorati does not do at all).  

In fact, the next crop of SEO Tools probably can't be created by the Brad Callen's and the Jeff Addison's of the world, or even the guy that writes OptiLink - they just don't have the horsepower or the imagination - in my opinion - to write the tools that would be most useful, for example, to a person like me - who wants to go further - to find exactly the right set of links for each client and then figure out how to get them.

Note - Jennifer hints that your going to have to approach each site - you might not get every link you ask for (say you get half - your doing pretty good)!

"…Use this information to decide which blogs you feel are worth contacting the same way that you would use information about a publication to put together a media list to target. Also remember that as you visit each blog, you may find links to other blogs in their posts, in a blog roll, and so on, and you might want to go back and research those blogs on Technorati as well.

Once you've built a list of blogs you'd like to target, spend a little time reading them to find out if they do product reviews, if they link out to resources and "

She says it above - Technorati will, at the end of the day, give you a list of blogs to target, to get links from - that's as far as she can go - the rest is up to each person (to get the links).

However, in the future I'd like to see an SEO/SEM tool that

A. Take a URL/Site as the Target (where links are going to be pointing to)

B. A Semantic Analysis of the the Target Site Plus you own optional keyphrases

C. Take A + B, use Technorati, BlogPulse, Google Blog Search and cull the web for links while categorizing all the urls found.

D. Allow for a Postive / Negative assesemnt of each url (probably beyond most tool makers today).

E. Provide instruction on how to contact each URL so chosen (as a good link).

Sort the whole list by a number of criteria such as Freshness, PageRank, number of Inbound Links to each URL, number of Outbound Links of each URL, ratio of inbound/outbound links, etc.

That's considerably beyond what we have today - which is why you kinda need to do it yourself manually - but in reality - I believe most of what I'm asking for is actually doable as a piggyback of of say……..any number of Social Media crawlers like Buzz metrics, BrandPulse and even Compete.com could probably do it - etc.  

The problem is, if firms like Nielsen get involved, it's going to cost an arm and a leg to use the platform - meaning, you'll end up reading Jennifer Laycock's article and doing it yourself.