By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-08-04 00:59:07 | Word Count: 664
When you set up a web presence, one of the things you want to do is start getting backlinks. They help your search engine ranking, and the more places that link to you, the more people can find you. However, not all backlinks are good ones. There are plenty of places where people can trade backlinks or buy backlinks, and a lot of those places just offer spam. Link farms are examples of places you don’t want to find your site listed.
Link farms, and similar sites don’t really provide backlinks that are valuable, but inexperienced website owners may think that just having a lot of backlinks will be enough. When they dodo not start seeing a lot of improvements on their site stats and traffic, they get upset – but they don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves by creating a lot of backlinks that aren’t beneficial to their websites or targeted to their niches. That’s why the ability to monitor your backlinks is so very important.
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Anyone who decides to monitor backlinks should know that there are plenty of options for doing that. Some of them are free, and some of them cost money. Yahoo Site Explorer is free and it works as well as or better than others I have seen This tool allows you to see how many sites are linking to you, who is linking to you and what they are linking to. One thing that Yahoo Site Explorer does not do is take data points and track the link velocity. Remember that everything is relative as the Search Engines are comparing and ranking for relevance on a keyword-for-keyword basis. Generally speaking the higher the quantity of naturally occurring targeted backlinks you have along with the higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher you will rank for targeted terms. We suggest Yahoo Site Explorer because it seems to count many links that Google either doesn’t wish to count or divulge. We also recommend Link Velocity Tool as you can track competitors and take data points. This allows you to go back and see what your backlink count was at a specific point and time in the past.
Monitoring your backlinks is important. If you don’t monitor them, how will you know who’s linking to you and what content they like on your site? When you monitor backlinks, you don’t do it just because it’s the thing to do or you’ve been told by other people that you should. You do it because you want to use that information to make yourself more successful. There are plenty of ways to gain success on the Internet, but ignoring backlinks because you don’t see their value isn’t one of them. It’s much better to learn all you can and get all the data you can get about your website, so you can make good choices for its future.
It’s also important to understand the quality and quantity of your backlinks are a deciding factor when search engines determine where to place your page in search results. If many people who have ‘web cred’ are linking to you, it tells search engines that your site is valuable, and it will be ranked higher.
Not everyone monitors their backlinks with the competitors in mind, but you can certainly do that if you want to. Try our Link Velocity Tool. You can monitor the relative speed of backlink growth between you and those competitive websites that you are interested in. It’s a way of monitoring all of your important players while keeping a close eye on your long term online objectives.
Of course, if you need help, we are right here … just contact us. You can call us at 1-800-736-9618.
