A Free Link Checker For Link Builders
When it comes to link building, measuring which links are taking hold and which ones are not is very important. Yahoo!s Site Explorer has been a tool that webmasters have used for many years and it has been considered the best free online link checker available. But it’s changing.
Exactly how Site Explorer is going to change is anybody’s guess, but Yahoo! has announced that its integration with Bing will lead to an inevitable change in Site Explorer some time in 2012. Here’s a snippet from the announcement:
When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites.
The bold text is mine.
Just what are these new features? No one knows. But if they improve Site Explorer, then they are welcome. For now, however, webmasters can go on using Yahoo!s Site Explorer as they always have – analyzing their inbound links and looking for new link building opportunities. My hope is that these features will not go away.
Why Your Content Needs Links
Content and links go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or like a hot dog and mustard (or ketchup if you are under 10 years old).
Seriously, building content is one thing. You can write great content and even make it shine for the search engines as you sprinkle it with your favorite keywords, but you’ll find that your best content really takes on a life of its own when it starts to attract links.
Links serve some very important purposes:
- Inbound links are used by search engines to determine the authority of a web page relative to other web pages on the same topic
- Links are a reflection of your brand
- Links can serve as a reputation management tool
- Links are a very important path for traffic to your website
- Links often serve as a clue to website content readers about the nature of the content on a web page being linked to
- Outbound links can be a way to attribute a source upon which your own ideas are based.
Links serve many purposes, but they are important because search engines use links to crawl the web. A web page cannot be crawled by search engine robots – hence, cannot be indexed – unless there are links pointing to it.
When it comes to building your content, don’t just think about the content itself. You should also consider how links – your own as well as any the content itself might attract from somewhere else – can be used to enhance the content and make it more valuable for your audience.
What Is A Web Citation?
Internet marketers don’t talk about web citations very often. But there is such a thing as a Web citation that doesn’t involve a link. It can be helpful in obtaining decent local search engine rankings.
If you look at your Google Place page as well as your Yahoo! Local and Bing Local listings, then you’ll notice that your business address and phone number are included in those listings. As they should be. But what if your business name, address, and phone number appear on other pages around the Web without a link pointing back to your website. Would that help you?
I believe these types of Web citations do, in fact, help you if you are a local business seeking local search rankings. It means that local businesses do not necessarily have to have a load of inbound links in order to rank for local search terms.
So where can you find these Web citations?
First and foremost, you should have your contact information on your website. Secondly, industry or niche business directories, as well as local community directories, can be a big help. Your local Chamber of Commerce website can also provide a link. If you are a travel-related business, then the local visitor’s information center could list you as a resource. General directories like YellowPages.com and Superpages can also provide the information.
In those listings, of course, a link can help you – it will never hurt. I am simply saying it isn’t necessary to give you a respectable local search ranking. However, you still want to be competitive.
Here are two scenarios to illustrate how links and Web citations work together to improve your local search visibility.
- You have 100 Web citations of equal relevance to your closest competitor’s 50 Web citations. All other search criteria data are equal. You will likely rank higher than your competition.
- Both you and your closest competitor have 100 Web citations of equal relevance. You have 100 inbound links of high quality and relevance while your competition has only 50 inbound links of equal quality and relevance. All other factors are equal. You will likely rank higher than your competition.
So, as you can see, Web citations are important for local search positioning, but so are links. If you have both, then you are going somewhere.
Change Makes Competitive Intelligence All The More Important
There is one big problem with the Internet – it’s always changing. I don’t mean on a daily basis, either. The Internet is a living, breathing animal that is changing by the minute. Take organic search for example. Search spiders are crawling the web as we speak, sucking in new content, following links, and generally trying to find the best content available.
A search conducted now could reveal entirely different results to an identical search performed an hour ago. The rate of change is such that competitive intelligence has a very short life span. Knowing a competitor has x number of links today could be worthless tomorrow, especially if they have been on a link-building campaign. Check the links tomorrow and they may have increased noticeably – they may have dropped as well.
Because the Internet is continually evolving, competitive intelligence is not a one off activity – it has to be ongoing with data available on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean you need to be buried in data, or to become fixated on what your competitors are doing. Rather, competitive intelligence has two major uses. One, from an Internet marketing perspective, it shows what areas you need to work harder in.
From a business perspective, competitive intelligence can help with your more traditional data like prices, models, reputation, free offers, or special marketing programs. With this knowledge, you can make business decisions aimed at either competing head on or adjusting your aim to target areas your competitors are not targeting. Without up-to-date competitive intelligence, your business has nothing with which to base its own progress on the Internet.
Does Social Media Interaction Add Credibility To Content?
Late last week Bill Hartzer wrote a post that discussed what he calls social validation and it’s importance to SEO. His rationale is that if content gets mentioned on social sites, for example, re-tweeted on Twitter or ‘liked’ on Facebook, then search engines will sit up and take more notice of that content. To quote from the post:
….the search engines (Bing and Google) are looking for social validation. They see your new URL and index it, but will rank it higher in the search results if they can find some reason to: and one of those reasons includes social validation.
There is little doubt that search engines are taking more notice of what is happening through social media. While this is important, it is also important to understand the wider implications of successfully promoting your content through social media. The more often your content is referred to through social media, the more likely it is to be referred to in other areas such as blogs and web pages. The result is an increase in the number of inbound links.
So this then begs a question – do pages that perform well after receiving a lot of mentions in social media do so because of that interaction, or is it because of the sudden increase in mentions throughout the web, the sudden increase in links? Many people would argue both, and they are probably right.
What is important to note is that creating content that is well written and well received will rise to the top of search results quite quickly, if those factors all come together. What is more important is to find ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ who are themselves well respected, especially by the search engines. Other users will follow their recommendations, meaning more traffic, more inbound links, and perhaps a few extra brownie points from the search engines. The lesson is simple – build credibility in your content by have those respected acknowledge it’s value.
Are You Using The Right Anchor Text For Local Search
Local search is not quite the same as organic search. Where for many years the preferred anchor text in links has been keyword orientated, local search is less keyword-based and more business or website name orientated. For local search, a link with your business name is often of more value than a link with a related keyword. In fact, there are many stories around suggesting that keywords in links are no longer the ideal – but that’s a story for another time.
When you think about local search, you have a distinct advantage over organic search. You can tell the search engines all about your business. In Google Places, for example, you can provide your official business name, your address, and your telephone number. You can also add tags and place your business into a category. With organic search, your search engine optimization program needs to use keywords to ensure the search engines know what your pages are all about.
The bottom line is this: Search engines don’t need anchor text to tell them about your business – you’ve already done that. Links that are in your business name have far more value than those with keywords as your anchor text. Add address details to the text around your business name, and you further reinforce your local search rankings. Local search is all about being local.
The more often your business is linked back to your site where your address is in plain view, or at the very least your town or region, the better. Are you pushing keywords in all your anchor text for local search? Try modifying some of your links to include your business and your town – or the service you provide and the town.
Local search is all about being local so shout your presence from the rooftops – or at least, from the friendly pages around you.
How Many Links Does It Take To Rank A Web Page?
At one time SEOs talked about something called keyword density. The idea was that if you put just the right number of keywords in your content then you could rank it pretty well in the search engines. Then Google came along.
For awhile after Google became the dominant search engine, keyword density was still talked about widely. But links became so much more important and after about three years it became apparent to many SEOs that inbound links were just as important or more important than the number of keywords on your page. Some SEOs even start saying that the number and type of inbound links to your web pages were more important for ranking purposes.
In fact, links did become important. In many cases, you could rank a web page for its key terms by finding the right kind and right number of links with just the right anchor text. Today, however, that’s a bit more difficult to do.
Links are still important, but all the search engines are a bit less forthcoming about how links fit into the overall picture. The search engines used to report your links. Now they don’t. Not much any way. And it’s a lot more difficult to find out information about how your links are affecting your search rankings.
The way it looks now, links are still important. They’re as important as they ever were, but there are so many ranking factors now that it’s difficult to say that there is any one ranking factor that is any more important than any other. We could probably identify a dozen or so ranking factors that are at the top of the ranking factor food chain and inbound link anchor text is one of them. Still, when it comes to the number of links you need to rank for a keyword, your guess is as good as mine.
Checking Your Competition’s Inbound Link Atrophy
We’ve found a cool tool for testing and comparison your link atrophy with that of your competition’s. In case you’re wondering, link atrophy is the process of your inbound links disappearing. Why does that happen?
First, it happens because domain owners that are linking to you have let their domain ownership lapse. If there is no domain then there is no link. That’s probably the number 1 reason why links disappear. But it’s not the only reason.
Another reason you could be seeing your inbound links disappear is because you have a disproportionate number of links from one domain compared to other domains. For awhile – and still today, actually – it was a popular strategy among website owners to build a blog on a separate domain from one’s own website and use it to build inbound links. As a result, these websites built up a large number of inbound links from one domain. That has caused link atrophy and can actually be detrimental to your marketing efforts.
Short term links also disappear after a period of time. Press releases, social bookmarking and other short term links only pass link juice for awhile. Then they disappear.
That’s three reasons for a high link atrophy percentage. If you test your link atrophy then you should also test the link atrophy of your competition and see who is faring better at keeping their links. If your competition is beating you – that is, their link atrophy percentage is lower – then you need to figure out why, and fix it.
Use this tool to check your link atrophy. Then check your competition’s.
Check Competitor Back Links Often
One of the most important competitive intelligence tools you have is a back link checker. The idea is to take a look at the inbound links pointing to your competitors’ websites. Many Internet marketers even go so far as to look at the websites linking in to those sites. The reason this is important is because many of those sites could also link to yours and all you may have to do is ask.
Link building is an integral part of Internet marketing. Not only does it drive traffic to your website, but it also can increase your search engine rankings.
Before you do any link building, take a look at your top competitors and their websites. Take a look at meta, keywords used in the content and inbound links. Those inbound links will tell a story and if you see a trend of inbound links from high PR relevant websites, be sure to follow that trend.
Why Your Competitors’ Inbound Links Matter
When it comes to competitive intelligence, there are a number of things that you want to know about your competition. One of those things is number and type of inbound links.
Inbound links are important for a number of reasons:
- It tells you how popular your competitors’ website is in other places on the web
- You can see the quality of websites that consider it worthy of links
- You’ll get an idea of how long it might take to build your own link portfolio and the types of links you should seek
- You can analyze your competition’s inbound links for anchor text value
- Check on potential link partners for your own website
Overall, inbound links are important for any website’s SEO. By studying your competition’s links you can get an idea of just how competitive they really are. Then you can design a strategy for overtaking them in the SERPs.
Learn more about competitive intelligence strategies.