If you are serious about SEO and increasing search traffic then it is important to track it, not just by logging into your analytics everyday but by keeping in depth records of which keywords are driving traffic and any abnormal fluctuations.

Working in an SEO agency it is important to track this for clients, you may increase a clients traffic tenfold but how are you going to prove the increase was due to your efforts?

One of the best ways to keep track of search traffic is to break it down into longtail and broad terms. At a glance you can quickly see any increases or decreases in traffic; this will help you to quickly jump on any opportunities or issues.

Using Google Analytics

In my experience there is no better traffic analysis tool than Google Analytics. It gives you so many ways to break down traffic and spot changes that it is literally a no brainer.

Using Google Analytics to track longtail traffic is fairly straight forward; however let’s just define what we mean by longtail;

Many people consider longtail traffic to be 3 words or more, however I and most experienced SEO’s I know consider longtail traffic to be any keyword that drives small amounts of traffic but has no real competition.

On that note let’s go over to analytics and break this down a little, the first thing you need to do is pull up the keywords your website was found on in the last month, then use the advanced filter at the bottom of the keywords to highlight any keywords that sent less than 5 visits.

These will all be longtail keywords, however in order to get an idea of growth and how they’re performing you need to see data from previous months;

Analytics allows you to view a direct comparison to previous months and allows you to see how your traffic is growing, or not.

It will also allow you to quickly see which keywords underperformed compared to previous months;

http://www.seowizz.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/comparisonkeyword.png

Now because I am a little bit of a geek and an obsessive SEO I like to keep track of this on a month to month basis, this allows me to see how my site has performed over a longer period of time and I use excel to help me track monthly increases and decreases with regards to search traffic on all levels;

The graph works by calculating the increases and decreases in traffic based on the amount of searches a particular keyword receives on a month by month basis.

From the above graph (which is based on SEO wizz) we can see that traffic was down in December all round with every type of keyword taking a hit, we can also see an increase in traffic in March on the keywords driving 200 or more searches a month, this correlates well with my first page rankings for “SEO” and “Search engine optimisation”, I no longer rank first page for SEO but when I did it drove a lot of traffic.

More importantly and for no apparent reason I saw a massive drop off in longtail terms or terms bringing 10 or less visits per month, this is in line with the longtail drop off reported by SEOmoz a couple of weeks ago.

Breaking down your traffic month by month noticing differences in search traffic on all levels will help you understand what part of your SEO strategy is working and highlight algorithm changes, like the one reported by Richard Baxter at SEO Gadget.

If you’re serious about SEO this is a must, how you monitor it is up to you but it is vital that you break down the different keyword levels.

Yes the title sounds obvious right? Of course optimised content and traffic equate to more traffic duh! But where do analytics fit in?

Well I have banged on enough about long tail keywords on this blog but guess what? I am going to do it again as this is a really simple technique for increasing traffic almost immediately by doing a little research in your own analytics.

So enough talking head over to your Google analytics and get your last month’s worth of keyword data. This will show you all the results you were found on over the course of the month but we need to do something a little extra before we begin to dig a little deeper.

Scroll to the analytics filter below the keywords;

Select advanced filter and choose visits. What we want to do is check out visits that brought us 20 visits or less over the month. These will probably be very long tail keywords that we rank for and with a little bit of tweaking we can increase traffic on them.

Let me go through an example, I have filtered the results on SEO wizz and have come up with the following;

Like most people long tail keywords drive around 60% of my total search traffic, as I look down the list one immediately stands out;

A quick rank check on an incognito window shows I rank 4th for the term “writing seo content”, I am probably only receiving around 5% of the traffic on this keyword and with a little optimisation I can probably rank second or first, remember there is a huge difference between ranking first and anywhere below;

Information from SEOmoz’s recent post;

As you can see ranking second will double my traffic on this keyword and ranking first will increase it nearly 9 times!!! So I currently get 19 visits but can probably add 20 to that a month with 30 minutes worth of work. If I carry out this sort of optimisation on all long tail keywords I can probably increase traffic from 5749 to 40,000 a month.

Now don’t get me wrong this is very labour intensive but just imagine the benefit if you do a couple of hours per week? You could be increasing your traffic significantly every month. Next steps?

Find the keywords > Optimise the page > Fire a few internal links with anchor text > Fire a few external links with anchor text!!……. Easy

Just a quick note to everyone that has emailed me in the last few weeks, I have been run off my feet at branded3 hence the lack of responses; however I still love you and will reply asap.

I always worry about posting new found research as some clever dick always pops up to tell you they discovered it in 1999, however I have noticed something in the rankings recently that has made me re think Google rankings.

The Story

OK so I decided a couple of weeks ago to rank for “SEO consultant”, just something I fancied really, not the most competitive term.

Anyway….. I have obviously been keeping an eye on the rankings over the past few weeks on this particular keyword and a few more as well and there has been some pretty dramatic trends in the rankings.

One day I checked and I was 7th for “seo consultant” refreshed and I was 15th, refreshed again and I was 4th!!!

It’s not just that keyword either, I searched “search engine optimisation” I was 11th, refreshed and I was 26th and again and I was 7th.

Now rankings have always been up and down but this was a little crazier than usual.

Webmaster Tools Update

So…. Google announce the webmaster tools up date only a few days ago which explains that they are now tracking click through rates in the keyword sections of webmaster tools.

Now I don’t know how accurate these figures are and they seem to differ quite a bit to Google analytics, however the data it presents is interesting.

Just take a look at the below screen shot;

Now I am only using “bing SEO” as the example but the data establishes a few things across multiple keywords.

The first thing you notice is that out of 320 impressions I only ranked first 260 times (these impressions figures aren’t accurate as I usually receive around 600 visitors on this keyword a month), this means I don’t rank number one, I only rank there around 70% of the time.

The Old Theory

The old SEO theory determines your rank based on page optimisation and the number of links your page/domain has, the only thing affecting rankings would be competition in Google’s algorithm. I now think this is outdated and wrong, over the last 6 months I and other SEO’s have seen massive fluctuations in rankings suggesting a new way of ranking sites and determining traffic.

My Theory

Well, this is what I suspect, Google have confirmed nothing yet or any other SEO authority but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests rotational rankings.

Let me explain…. You do a search in Google on your main key term and you rank 4th, so you rank 4th??? Wrong you may rank 4th in that instance but you could complete the same search 10 seconds later and you rank 10th, a huge difference not only in ranking but the traffic too.

So… Google determines the rank of your site determined on page factors and links and then ranks you in a range of positions could be 5 – 10 or it could be position 2 to 4 pages back, depending on the person searching, there location, personalised search, time of day.

Ultimately how well optimised your site is determines how often you rank in a top position.

So your aim is not to rank in the top 5, which is now impossible, your aim should be to rank their most of the time.

What Does This Mean?

It means quite a lot.

1 – Determining traffic in a certain position is now impossible

2 – Your ranking position can change every second even if you’re searching on the same IP using an incognito window on chrome

3 – You can never say I rank number one, but only I rank number one most of the time

You see there are so many websites competing for the same space that Google has no choice but to use a rotational system like this and for all we know they may use the click through rate to decide whether your ranking gets better or worse, maybe.

I’d love to know everyone’s thoughts on this and if anyone has noticed these changes.

Testing keyword difficulty has never been a straight forward task, what do you test with? Links in? Links to domain? Search Volume? Awords Competition?

The truth is that all of them contribute toward the ‘keyword difficulty’ factor.

This is another post when I am going to sing the praises of the SEOmoz crewe, since they stopped delivering SEO services I have noticed a huge investment in their tools, mostly in making linkscape data more reliable but also tweaking the current tool box.

A tool that was announced this week was the new keyword difficulty tool, it breaks down all the metrics for you, so if your an SEO professional there is no better visualisation tool for client proposals, in my opinion.

Just check out some of the features:-

Adwords Data

Not only does the tool give you a difficulty factor in the form of a percentage (the higher it is the harder it is to rank) but it also gives you the relevant Adwords search including broad and exact match.

This is all the information you really need when trying to determine the potential of target keywords however, it doesn’t stop there.

Page / Domain Authority Metrics

The tool nicely shows the page and domain authority of the top ten sites, letting you see exactly what you’re up against.

Page authority is the SEO metric for the overall authority of any given page on the web based on link juice and authority, domain authority is based on the entire links to the domain as a whole.

Break Down Of Links

As we should know now, all links are not equal and we need to be aware of how many links our competition have, also how much authority those links are passing.

On top of that we now know that the amount of links to a domain is almost as strong a determining factor as the amount of links to a particular page.

As we can see the tool nicely breaks down the link data showing how many unique domains are linking to each of the top ten results.

Now if you’re not an SEO or internet marketer your probably not going to pay for the tool, however if you are an SEO professional, in my opinion the tools are the best on the market.

This particular tool can be used for more than just helping clients visualise their competition within their niche, it can also be used for mass research on the SERPS for multiple keywords.

Before you begin any SEO campaign there are a few things you really need to think about, one of them is “who are my competition?”.

If you intend to compete in a certain market you need to firstly be clear about your keywords and secondly clear about your competition, or more importantly what your competition are doing right.

There are many different aspects to look at both on and off page however, I would like to show you a really simple way of collecting your competitor’s links so that you can have a full spreadsheet of all the links that are helping those topping Google rank where they rank.

Now before I go into this I’d like to come clean, the tool you need to use is a paid tool, I am not promoting it but just to let you know at this point you may need to invest a little.

SEOmoz

I really do hate sounding like a fan boy but the truth is when it comes to SEO tools SEOmoz have it licked, yes there are plenty of decent analysis tools out there but the sheer amount of the web SEOmoz are able to crawl makes their service unbeatable in my opinion.

Open Site Explorer

One of the tools that makes up part of their package is Open Site Explorer, it is like Yahoo’s site explorer on steroids!

Anyway enough of the promotion, how do we use this tool to really strip down our competitors link profile?

Well here is what I would do…..

Get Those Links!!

First you want to head over to the tool, then simply input the page you want to investigate.

Yes I am using SEOmoz as the tester but they won’t mind

Once you have input your details this will bring you up a nice list of links, your competitors links, but it is not quite the finished product yet and we need to play around with it.

OK….

Just under the main nav you have various drop down menus, this allows you to filter out certain links…

At this point I would suggest filtering out no follow links and filtering out any internal links.

You can use internal links to see how your competition link to their high ranking pages, can be insightful, but that’s for another post.

So….

Now you have your list of links it is time to export them into an excel spreadsheet using the option below the drop downs.

(If you are downloading a particularly large link profile then this may take a few minutes depending on your connection speed.)

OK so we have all the details in a lovely excel spreadsheet, but were not done…..

Let’s neaten it up a little

So you have a spreadsheet looking something like this?

OK…

Firstly get rid of the nonsense at the top, check.

Now there are plenty of things in this spreadsheet we don’t need.

• Highlight the ‘URL’ column and filter out all duplicate cells using the ‘Data’ and Advanced filter options in excel.
• Secondly delete the title, followable, 301, origin and target url columns.

Now sort the columns in order of page authority and you have a list of your competitors links in the order of the most powerful.

Neaten up the spreadsheet a little and go ahead and download more of your competitor’s links!!

You are never going to beat those at the top unless you can get the same links, no you don’t have to and shouldn’t mimic the entire profile just pick out the best ones.

OK it’s not often I recommend systems or tools on SEOwizz and I have to admit this tool has been developed by a client I am currently working with, however this is a plugin every wordpress blogger should consider installing.

With the recent WordPress down time scare, it is obvious backing up all that precious content is a worthwhile exercise and before now it has consisted of emailing files to yourself every night or every week if you have a smaller blog.

Backup technology a client of Branded3 and an enterprise online backup company have just launched an WordPress Backup Plugin, which makes backing up your information easy and reliable.

Not only does the plugin have an easy to use interface but it also allows you 50 MB of space, 100% free of charge.

You can set the plugin to backup your information on auto pilot daily or whenever you want, it saves you time and of course it’s free.

Even if you don’t want to set up the scheduling you can still have backup on demand!

If you use wordpress you should definitely try this one out.

Download it here: WordPress Online Backup Plugin

You no doubt monitor your ranking within Google and even though many online authorities say keyword ranking is not as important as it once was there are still a number of reasons to keep track of it.

1) It lets you know Google is happy with your optimisation practices

2) It helps you understand how site and page changes affect your rank

3) And of course it helps keep you motivated (if you’re moving in the right direction)

So, monitoring your own site is a given, however do you monitor the search results page in general for your target keyword?

For example I am targeting the keyword ‘search engine optimisation’ it is highly competitive and after 8 months of hard work I am sitting on the second page in the UK.

As part of my SEO practice for this keyword I check my rank position weekly; however I also check the top 20 – 30 positions to look for changes and any websites that may have been penalised.

Now recently there has been a major movement in the UK within the SERPS for the keyword “search engine optimisation” and that is with the website and seo company SEOconsult. They have recently dropped from the first page down to the third page.

It’s important to remember at this point that we are NOT dealing with a site that spammed it’s way to the top, SEOconsult are a reputable business and still sit on the first page of Google for the keyword SEO, they have over 50,000 back links and a Page Rank 6 (for all it is worth).

However, if you take the time to look at the link profile of the site it will soon become clear in my opinion.

First Let’s Contrast It

If you ever see this happen to a competing site or indeed if it happens with your own site, the first place to go is the front page of Google. Look down the top 10 results of the SERPS and pick out a ranking site that seems the weakest out of the bunch, or the one with the least amount of links.

I did this for the keyword ‘search engine optimisation’ and picked out the page Topclickmedia, this site has a significantly less amount of links pointing to the page, in fact it only has around 6000 but in order to see why this page ranks on the first page and SEOconsult have been dropped you need to look at the link profile in a little more depth.

I quickly used the SEObook backlink analyzer to do this but you can use any software you wish. It only pulls out 1000 of the most important links but it is enough to understand why the sudden drop has occurred and why the smaller page is ranking higher.

First let’s take a peek at some of the links pointing to Topclickmedia;

Now looking down this link profile I specifically targeted links using variations of the keyword “search engine optimisation” and as you can see it is a very interesting link profile.

There are a few things to note here;

1) The links are made up of lot’s of different variations, there is obviously exact anchor text but only around 25% were exact, 39% were variations of the keyword.

2) The links come from deep pages of other sites and not homepages

3) The links are mainly in content making up part of a blog post or an article

I would say this is a big thumbs up for Topclick they are getting in content/editorial links using multiple variations and hey they rank higher with fewer links.

Google have been spouting for a while that they want to give more credit to natural looking anchor text profiles and editorial links but the evidence has been thin to say the least. Has there been an update?? I strongly believe there has.

Let’s Take A Peek at SEOconsult

Right, time to compare the link profile to see how it differs and to see if we can see any clues as to why the rankings may have been hit.

The snippet above is pretty much what you see throughout the rest of the links, most of them anchored with exact keyword terms “SEO” “search engine optimisation” and “search engine optimization”, there is very little in the way of variation. However, that’s not all, it is also quite clear that most of the links are in footers, sidebars and directory listings.

So my verdict…

I believe SEOconsult has been penalised due to their highly optimised anchor text and lack of editorial like links. These kinds of changes have been seen on the Google.com domain months ago and it looks like they’re filtering through to the co.uk side.

Why would Google make these changes??

It’s simple really and makes sense;

1) Directory links, footer links, sidebar links are more likely to be either paid for or site wide.

2) Even though Google encourages keywords in anchor text, highly optimised link profiles scream manipulation and Google does not want to look stupid.

3) Links within content are generally on deeper low PR pages, this means they have a higher probability of being editorial in nature.

Conclusions

I am not saying to stay away from site wide links or even footer links completely. I am simply highlighting that in general your link profile needs to be editorial in nature and your anchor text needs to look naturally varied, stick to around 25% exact anchor on manufactured links.

I hope this has been helpful.

This is definitely my last post before the Jolly Holidays, hope everyone has a good one and wakes up on Christmas morning with a first page ranking

Disclaimer – The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and not factually based principles. The author is not associated with Google in anyway or any of the above businesses mentioned.

Is there any real need for on page optimisation anymore? All of my research on the SERPS seems to be pointing in 1 direction and that is, when it comes to high rankings for competitive terms only your link profile really matters.

After all Google is still ranking number 2 for the keyword “caffeine” even though all it does is slap it in the title tag and has a shed load of links, the result is only relevant to somebody searching for it from an internet marketing background, those wanting information on a mild drug are going to be disappointed.

Anyway, as well as examples like the above and ongoing comments in the SEO industry about ‘how headings are no longer of value’ I decided to carry out a little research myself.

The research was based on the heading tags h1 – h4 and on general keyword density. Like with so many of the other tests I perform this one was based on 25 search terms and the top 8 results were examined.

Headings Optimisation

I guess the first place to start is with the headings, it is an area I also believe has lost most of its value but let’s peak at the results before coming to a conclusion.

For those of you who aren’t sure how headings are supposed to work with SEO, basically it is taught that you should use your keyword in them to build relevance h1 holding the most weight and decreasing accordingly to h6.

The first test was simple, ranking pages 1-8 were tested to see if they had optimised their heading tags for the target keyword.

A score was given to each heading optimised on each site h1 = 8 h2 = 6 etc… The ranking position with the highest score had obviously better optimised headings.

As you can see from the graph the blue line represents the true ranking order and the red line is how it would rank if rankings were based on optimised headings.

There are massive differences here and even though this is correlation and not causation I still feel it is a strong indication that headings are not quite as valuable as one may think.

If you look at the below chart;

62.5% of pages on the first page have the h1 optimised for the target keyword, however 0% have the h4 optimised.

I can also confirm that 15% of the pages tested had not optimised any headings.

The only thing we can take from this is that if you are going to optimise your headings, stick to h1 and h2 the rest seem to be irrelevant but don’t expect it to work miracles for your rankings because it won’t.

Keyword Density

In this test the same 25 pages were checked for keyword density rates against the target phrase. The percentages were taken and the below chart shows the results.

Even I was surprised at these results, when re ranked the sites there was almost a complete reverse with the lowest ranking sites having the highest keyword density.

So what does this mean??

Keep things to a natural level use the keyword naturally but don’t feel under pressure to use it in every paragraph because it clearly does not matter.

Where does this leave on page optimisation?

Well what can I say?

First of all there is a lot more to on page search engine optimisation other than keyword issues;

- Crawlability
- Internal Linking
- Sitemaps
- Click Paths
- Code to Content Ratio

etc…..

However in my opinion the days of stressing over keyword density, keyword proximity or prominence are over along with heading optimisation, it just is not as powerful as it once was.

The only place to worry about your keywords, in my opinion, is in your title tag, outbound links and obviously try and get it in the content a couple of times. Apart from that the jobs a good one.

There are obviously a few areas I didn’t touch on;

- How does this apply to longtail keywords?
- Does keyword position matter? Top, bottom, sidebar, footer
- I also did not take into account image alt attributes

These are all posts for another time. So quit worrying about how many times you’ve stuffed your keyword into your content and start building some links

I want to address something today which seems to be a concrete SEO principal yet I see very little evidence around to justify the theory.

The theory goes something like this “Over optimising your anchor text can cause a Google penalty, as Google have filters in their algorithm that pick up on anchor text manipulation” , you may have heard something slightly different but the idea is the same.

The above theory poses a few questions, namely;

1) What is anchor text optimisation?

2) Should we engage in it?

3) Can we over optimise our anchor texts?

This post incorporates some factual research with what I consider my own thoughts and feelings on anchor text.

What is anchor optimisation?

I am sure most of you know what anchor text or link text is but for those of you who may not it is the text used to create a link back to your site, or the text in the middle of the ‘a’ and ‘alt’ tags. This is anchor text and optimising simply means to include the keyword you are targeting within it.

Simple really, if you have a page targeting the keyword “search engine optimisation” then you try and get as many anchored links as possible with that text in, this is also known as ‘keyword sniping’.

Should we engage in anchor optimisation?

OK, first let me ask a question; Do you want to rank high for competitive key phrases?

If the answer is yes, then YES you need to optimise your anchor text whenever possible. I think I explain this best with a little factual research.

After analysing the links of the top 5 sites for 15 different key phrases, the answer whether or not to optimise seems clear;

As you can see on average the sites had 34% of all their links anchored with the exact search phrase they were ranking for and on average 40% of their links were anchored with a variation including the exact key phrase.

Example

Exact = search engine optimisation

Variation = organic search engine optimisation services

Not a variation = search engine marketing and optimisation

Variations were only counted when the exact keyword in the right order was within it.

On top of this information the average site in the top 5 used an average of 20 variations all including the exact match within them.

What does this tell us?

Clearly it shows that if we want to rank high on Google we need to be targeting our keyword in the anchor text.

What About the other 60%

On average 60% of the links did not include the keyword and used other types of related keywords and variations. Remember all links carry link juice no matter what they are anchored with, however Google clearly puts a good amount of weight on the anchor text therefore you cannot rank for a competitive term without optimising the anchor text.

So the other 60% will pass link juice and authority but will do very little to help you rank for a specific term.

Can we over optimise?

Now I can’t say that I have ever had a site been penalised for over optimisation of anchor text, however Aaron Wall at SEObook claims he was hit in the early days of the site. There have also been other reports of anchor text penalties because of manipulative behaviour.

I am not sure if I buy it, primarily because it would then become easy to sabotage a competitor’s site, just build a ton of links with the exact anchor in it.

However to be on the safe side I would recommend using variations as well as an exact match.

Remember you are only going to be in control of a percentage of your links, so these are the ones you have to make count. I would recommend picking an exact keyword and around 15 – 20 variations of it, use the exact text 7 times out of 10 when writing articles, submitting to directories etc… the rest of the time use a variation, try it on a rotating system.

This means you are keeping things safe and in line with the top 5 sites on Google in the above test.

The rest of your links will be out of your control and could come with a range of anchors, there is nothing you can do about that, just keep creating the anchor text links.

If you are in any doubt of the absolute power of anchor text, do a search for ‘caffeine’ look who sits at number 2!!! Google with a page that has nothing to do with ‘caffeine’, want to know why? Anchor text.

Then type in ‘click here’ what do we have? Adobe!!! That is because all of their links are anchored click here!!

I hope this answers any questions you may or may not have been having about anchor text, don’t be scared by those who tell you that you will be penalised, you need to optimise them in order to compete, simple.

If you are actively attempting to optimise your website you will no doubt be monitoring your growth. Google rank, organic traffic and indexed content is something we should definitely be looking at, however there is another important aspect and that is the growth of our link profile.

There is a fundamental problem with trying to monitor your link growth, firstly there is no tool that can list 100% of your links (Don’t worry Google knows about all your links but chooses not to show them), the second problem is knowing how many of those links contribute to your page authority.

What I want to do in this post is go through some of the ways we can check our link growth, how we should monitor it and which statistics to use.

Right lets jump straight into it:

Google

OK the obvious place to look for links is on Google,

Simply type in link:yourdomain and it will show pages that link to your domain;

As you can see from above this is the snap shot from SEOwizz.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, only 11 linking pages????

and here lies the problem;

The Problem

Google only shows a tiny percentage of the links to your site and in actual fact my count using this method fluctuates between 11 – 72. The reason for this I do not know.

Before anyone thinks Google is discounting links because of low quality or something, first know this.

I have links from over 50 PR4 pages including sites like SEOmoz, I also have links from a few PR5 and 6 pages, none of these show when I perform a link search on Google.

This is not the way you should be tracking links in my opinion and frankly means nothing in terms of keyword rankings.

I have consistently ranked on the first page for “google seo” and “seo techniques” despite massive fluctuations with the link count on this search.

Google Webmaster Tools

OK you can open up a webmaster tools account and submit and verify your site, once this is done Google will show you how many links are pointing to your pages, but again this is only a portion of the pages:

As you can see from the above pic, I have 2534 links pointing to the domain and 342 to the homepage, this is a more accurate figure in my opinion but again Google still only shows a partial amount of links, in my opinion Google only show the strongest links here.

The Problem

The main problem with the webmaster tools count is that it fluctuates so much, it is a good indicator of how many quality links you have pointing to a domain but it far from an ideal way of assessing popularity growth.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Now if you head on over to yahoo site explorer you will certainly get a better idea of where you are in link popularity terms.

Now there are some fluctuations on here and still even though it shows a lot more links it is not all of them, however this is the one I recommend on using when assessing raw link popularity, in fact any SEO tools I have ever used usually fall somewhere in between webmaster tools count and yahoo, usually closer to Yahoo.

The Problem

As I said yahoo is so much better for assessing raw popularity however it doesn’t give you any info about the quality and this is the hardest area to get around.

SEO Tools and How I Assess Link Growth

This is my advice and it is how I assess the link growth of all my clients, I will be mentioning certain tools in this section but they are not affiliate linked or even endorsed, I recommend them because they are the best.

Link Popularity

Already answered this one really, yahoo site explorer, this is how I asses link popularity growth but not how I assess how link quality is growing.

Tools

The SEOmoz Linkscape tool helps you to see how many quality links you have pointing to your page and how many route domains point to your page, you can actually get this information free by setting up an account, of course if you want in depth info you would need to go PRO, which in my opinion is only worth it if your site is making a real income for you or if your an SEO professional.

Some Things To Note

- SEOmoz only shows how many quality links point to you

- The tool performs a crawl of the web every 4 – 6 weeks so if you build links today you might to see them on SEOmoz for a couple of months.

As well as the SEOmoz tool you can also purchase SEO Elite, this allows you to see the PR of the page pointing to you and if the link is followed.

My advice is this use yahoo for link popularity and SEOmoz or Google webmaster tools count to assess how many quality links you have pointing to your page, but remember these only update every 2 months.

Why Don’t They Give Us It Straight?

The only way any tool could provide us with every single link pointing to our domain is if it could crawl the entire web and only Google possesses that kind of power. So why don’t they tell us about all our links??

Well the main excuse is competition, Google don’t want competitors to be able to discover everyone of your back links so they don’t make the information available. I guess you could then argue that they could provide it in the webmaster tools info, yes they could, why don’t they??? No idea other than maybe they don’t want to assist anyone to game the algorithm.

So when it comes to analysing link growth stick with yahoo for link popularity and SEOmoz/Webmaster Tools for link quality.

This post came from a question I was asked by Mike at HTS Tech Tips. If anyone has any questions feel free to forward them to me, I am happy to address any questions in emails and posts.