Small Business SEO: Get to Grip With Links

Rob Chant

When thinking about SEO, many website owners put undue attention onto the site itself, worrying about things such as meta tags, keyword density (actually a myth ), headings, and titles. While on-site factors do play a part in SEO (especially when it comes to content), they pale into insignificance when it comes to links.

Most SEO practitioners spend their days obsessing over links and link building, but many site owners ignore them completely or pay them only cursory heed. The reason for this is pretty obvious: your site is something very tangible that you can see and pore over without any effort, whereas links can be a somewhat vague concept without dedicated tools.

Let's do something to redress that balance.

Monitoring Your Links

First, don’t use Google's link: search operator to check your links. It's notoriously inaccurate and regarded as being for entertainment purposes only (more on Google's philosophy and reasoning for this apparently broken tool here).

So if you can't use the link: command, what can you use? Your first port of call is Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools supplies you with a wealth of information about what Google knows about your site, as well as how it performs in the search results and +1 metrics. Although the accuracy and validity of the information given even here is often questioned, it's an invaluable tool for webmasters.

In amongst this information is the "Links to your site" page. This is where the action begins.

There are two main numbers with which you need to become intimately familiar: the number of links to your site and the number of domains linking to your site. Both these pieces of information are available in "Links to your site," albeit in separate pages.

The number of links will almost always be higher than the number of domains, as you will often have more than one link from any site that is linking to you. Two links are better than one, but two links from two separate domains are even better. So, it's that latter number that's the most important.

But wait -- you may already have spotted a fine detail with those figures. Google isn't telling you the number of linking domains, they're telling you about the top linking domains. Once again, Google has taken an important piece of information and filtered it without giving you any explanation. Read More...