How To Discover The Webpages With Back Links To Your Website

By now you understand the reason for doing all that article marketing and forum participation is to generate backlinks to your website. The backlinks, if the do not have 'no follow' tags on them will contribute to your page popularity in the search engines.

To assess your progress you need a way to assess how many live baclimks you have pointing to your website.

By the way, the number of backlinks pointing to your website is your link popularity.

Once you know how many links are pointing to your website, you need to drill down further and take a closer look at the sites generating these links.

In this post, I will only cover how to find out your link popularity but in a later post we will go over the things you need to analyze on these linking sites websites

Before I go into it, I just want to tell you guys that link popularity is crucial to your website's ranking in the search engines.

Although Google, Yahoo and MSN do not give away their ranking algorithm, experience and wiser marketers than I have suggested that Ranking is related to content and link popularity.

Get link popularity right and you could be in that covetted number 1 spot for your keyword.

So, How do you assess your link popularity

Search engines: I recommend Yahoo for this. I'll explain why shortly. Anyway load the Yahoo search bar and type in link:Your site's url and press enter. Use the domain.com, http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/ variations. The results returned often vary with what form of your URL you type in. This will turn up the websites linking to you. Problem with Google is they do not display all the sites whereas the Yahoo search bar gives a more robust list. Even with Yahoo, some links may be missed out but it gives you a general idea of how well your linking strategy is working.
Software: You can get a more accurate assessment of your link popularity by using special software that is designed for this particular purpose. Now you can go out and pay some to build the software for you or you can buy one of the many available on the market. Now, the software I use and recommend to you is a little pricey but, for my business, was well worth the investment. It does the following

Discovers you link popularity
Tells you whether the links are contributing to your your ranking or are no follow links
Displays your anchor tags. These are the terms that are used to link back to your website
Displays the page rank [Google and Alexa] of the site linking to you.

If that was all this website does, it would already be worth the cost. But it has a whole load of other functions eg article submission, link exchange, gfinds authority sites in you niche. To learn more about this software click SEO Elite.

For the newbies, you are probably wondering why it is important to assess your link popularity. Simply to help you focus your efforts on activities that yield a result.

Say for example you are into forum participation. And you have spent hours on posting quality comments on forums with your backlink in your signature. How do you know which forums actually have your link and how many have the 'no follow' tag?

To learn more about link popularity and creating baclinks, click Link Popularity for a free guide

Till next time