I’ve said it before – an overwhelming majority of the business owners I meet these days want to talk about search engine optimization and Internet marketing. That’s fine by me. I love talking about it.
Last night I was at a networking event and was reminded of a very common theme that I have experienced lately: business owners are generally aware of the importance of inbound links (links from other websites to their website), but a lot of them (anecdotally, I’d estimate as many as 8 out of 10) don’t know any of the following:
- How many links are pointing to their website
- What links are pointing to their website
- Exactly what pages on their website are the recipients of links
As a result, they also don’t know other really crucial things such as:
- How many broken links (links coming from other websites that are now dead because the page has been moved or deleted) are out floating around on other websites
There’s an easy and FREE way to check all of these things through Google Webmaster Tools (WMT). (I’ve said this before as well – a WMT account is mandatory for website owners, whether or not they actually manage their website.)
BRIEF TANGENT: I don’t necessarily blame business owners that don’t know about basic tools like this. Many don’t actually manage their website. They have plenty of things to do like grow their company. To me, the really troubling thing is that their webmasters don’t know either. And if they do know, they are not sharing this valuable and easily-available data with their clients. Trust me on this: if your webmaster isn’t checking this regularly, then they aren’t doing their job.
So the first step is to get a WMT account.
The next step is to verify that you have the necessary access to that website. That’s done by either uploading an HTML file (that Google will provide) to your website’s root folder or some meta data (again, Google will provide it) to your website.
Once that’s done, let the good times roll! Within a few weeks, you’ll start seeing data trickle in. For the sake of this post, you’ll want to pay attention to the “Your Site on the Web” link on the left of your screen. Click that and you’ll have access to a link called “Links to Your Site”. That’s the one that will tell you all of the data we’ve listed above.
What’s really cool is that you can click any of the pages on your site that have inbound links and find out exactly where those links come from. And if your curious, you can click any of those inbound links and see the actual page that’s linking to your website.
Note: this tool is not real-time. So if you publish a great new blog post today that you know a lot of people are going to link to, allow WMT some time (up to a few weeks) to find those links.
To sum it all up, links to your website are gold when it comes to SEO. As the very least, you should know what your link portfolio looks like. Google’s Webmaster Tools is a great way for you to get a handle on who is linking to your website and where exactly they are linking.
Good luck and let me know if you have any questions or comments.