In a previous article, we talked about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and about how it could benefit your business by increasing exposure to your website.
Today, we will discuss link analysis, a fundamental component of SEO. So let’s get started!
An SEO Reminder
As we previously talked about, SEO is essentially a series of actions that serve to optimize your website for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. By optimizing your site, you are increasing the chances that it will rank highly in search engine results pages, or SERP’s.
Essentially, when someone does a search for a keyword in a search engine, you want your website to be displayed first in the results; the higher your website places, the more clicks your site will get.
If you have any doubts about this, then think about the last time you did a search on Google: did you go through ten pages of results or did you click on one of the first links you were returned? This is the power of search engine traffic.
Importance of Links
In our previous article, we also talked about the importance of inbound links. Basically, these are links displayed on other sites that point to your own website.
For Google and others, the more relevant and quality links that point to your own website, the better quality your own website is considered to be. Therefore, your site ranking is improved in search engine results for relevant keyword searches.
Link Analysis
Link analysis is the process of discovering and examining how your website is linked on the internet. When we do link analysis, we try and answer some of the following basic questions:
- Who is linking to our website?
- How many links do we have to our website?
- What is the quality of our inbound links?
- How are inbound links being displayed?
- How do our competitors’ links compare with our own?
- How can we increase exposure of our website through external links?
All these questions help us determine the relative popularity and exposure of our own website and gives us ideas on how to create more links to our content to improve SEO.
The Link Analysis Toolbox
There is an absolute plethora of link analysis tools available, both paid and free. Here, we will outline some of the free tools, in random order, that you can use to give you a basic start.
1. Biz Shark
Allows you to search by company name and returns a basic fact sheet that includes, for our interest, a section entitled “Social Links.” When you click on this link, you get a list of websites and blogs that have a link to that company website.
Biz Shark may not have an exhaustive list of every business out there, but it can give you an idea of some of the inbound links that your largest competitors have.
2. Open Site Explorer
A great website that offers free link analysis with a paid option for more detailed reports. The tool gives a summary of current inbound links, the authority or quality of those links, the anchor text that is used for the link and also gives you the option to compare two or more sites.
Here is a suggested list of actions:
- Start by searching your own website using the tool
- Open a new browser and do a Google search for keywords that relate to products or services that your company deals with
- Take note of the first results that Google returns (your competitor websites)
- Go back to the tool and run a link analysis on your competitor websites that are best optimized according to Google
Why do all this? Well, the basic assumption is that websites that tend to have the best ranking in Google search are also the websites that tend to have a relevant list of quality inbound links.
3. Alexa
Alexa is a website ranking company. Essentially, they rank websites in terms of website traffic. It may not always be accurate but as a tool among many others, it can offer some insight into the visibility of your website as well as those of your competitors via link and traffic analysis.
4. Yahoo Site Explorer
Another great free service, this time courtesy of Yahoo. Search your own website or run a report for your competitor websites and Yahoo will list available inbound links.
These are some of the tools available to you to get you started in basic link analysis for your company website. If you want to start improving the visibility of your company on the web, then it helps to look at how your site is currently linked (or not) internet.
These four free tools will get you started on the right path towards greater search engine optimization. It’s also a good idea to do this kind of link analysis at least once a month to give you an idea of weather the number of quality and relevant backlinks is increasing.
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