How Can you Track Link Building Efforts?
It’s all well and good going out there and sourcing links, but you can’t then chase them all up to see which ones have fallen flat and which are going along nicely. It would take too long. So how can you quicken this process up?
Well, this is where your good friend Webmaster Tools comes in. As well as offering a way to submit your sitemap and troubleshooting issues with your internal links, it is a useful resource for measuring links coming. But why is this important?
As you know links are the glue that bonds all SEO together. They provide the strength and authority for any site, therefore ensuring you have a decent spread right across your site is vital. Google Webmaster Tools will highlight all of the links that it is currently viewing and counting towards your PageRank. Therefore, there aren’t many better barometers of how effective link building has been.
Your link profile will actually fluctuate over time. Not all of links will stay there forever, pages get archived, sites removed and some just expire. This is why you have to continue all SEO efforts even when you think you’ve reached some kind of pinnacle. Resting on your laurels is a sure fire way to allow your competition to get in and steal your rankings from right under your nose.
So what exactly can you learn from your link profile? Well, you can see how successful particular campaigns have been. For example, when you submit a press release, it will often get picked up and republished elsewhere. Using the link statistics at hand, you can see exactly how many sites picked it up and how their links are fairing.
You can of course also use Yahoo Site Explorer, which only requires a URL to get hunting for links. It’s quick, but it also tends to have certain inaccuracies. These include showing multiple links from your own domain (not useful when tracking inbound links) as well as other weak links that Google aren’t counting towards your profile. Not to worry though, if this is your metric, stick to it.
Of course you don’t want to get too wrapped up in just testing the domain’s overall links. Whilst this will have the most notable movements in the short-term, it is the individual pages that really count. When you’ve had a concentrated campaign for a few pages you want to be able to see if your rewards have been rewarded.
PageRank is obviously a very tenuous method of measuring your link building efforts. Whilst it is true that the more quality links you receive, the higher your PR will be, it can take months for these figures to shift. Your PR can suddenly jump weeks after you got the links that made the difference – it is therefore far from being a clear indicator and certainly isn’t in any kind of real-time.
So if you want to see if your link building is paying dividends or misfiring, get on Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer and start digging [for more information about Webmaster Tools see: How Webmaster Tools Can Be Used to Improve Your Site]. Track changes and make sure you know exactly what’s going on from page to page.
