Do you ever wonder how many websites are linking to your site? Or what sites they are? Or what sites are linking to your competitors’ sites?

Here’s an easy way to find out:
Go to Google and type in “link: yourURL”

So for me, that would be “link: www.hoeck.net”. You don’t need the quotation marks. You can also try this on Yahoo and MSN, but you may need to delete the space between the colon and the start of your URL. You can also go to linkpopularity.com and they’ll search Google, Yahoo, and MSN all at once for you, but with different results than you may get on your own. I’ve not found it to be an exact science, but it does give you a good idea of what websites have your website address listed.

Why is link popularity important? Here are several reasons:

1. If prospects find your link on someone else’s site and can click through to yours, that’s a good thing! They’re more likely to be qualified prospects by coming through a referral site. You may find out that some sites list your site that you weren’t aware of, and you can drop them an email and thank them for it. It might also give you some ideas — if that type of site felt it valuable to list you, perhaps other similar sites might as well, which would mean more qualified traffic for you. Search them out and ask for a listing.

2. Most of the major search engines now factor link popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality, relevant sites which link to your site can actually improve your search engine rankings. That’s a free boost!

3. Checking into your competitors’ link popularity can give you some valuable clues as well — perhaps some of the sites that list them would also be interested in linking to you. Email them to find out — the more quality links you have, the better.

4. Most prospective customers today do Internet research before purchasing, and they’re sure to check you and your company out. If they do a search of your company name or website and you show a lot of listings, your credibility factor is increased over those who have fewer listings or don’t show up at all.

Tip: When asking a site to add your link, ask them to add your company name as well, and in bold, if they will. That way the search engine spiders will have a better chance of finding you.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 10th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Tactics and Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.