Probably the most important part of any webmasters tasks is backlinks.  If they want their site to rank high in the SERPs they need as many quality backlinks as possible.

But how do you know how many backlinks you have?

Well there are a few ways to check your backlink count, ranging from various software programs you can use to commands in your favourite search engine.

To check your backlinks in Google, similar to the “site:” operator, we use the “link:” operator.

link:123seotalk.com

After testing this out, you may have noticed that it’s not very accurate.  In fact Google only updates its backlink about once ever month and the best way of checking these is in your Google Webmaster account under external links.

Yahoo has a more up to date backlink count and will give you a better idea of your realtime backlinks.  To check these we can use the “site:” operator, like we do in Google, then click on the “Inlinks” button.  Or we can use a different operator:

linkdomain:123seotalk.com

This takes us straight to the Inlinks page and you can see realistically what backlinks you have.

There are quite a few other operators you can use to your advantage, see our Search Engine Tips page.

There are various other backlink checker websites which will do the same job and some even combine all the search engines in the one result so you can see at a glace your combined count.

On the software front, there’s one free tool called Link Popularity Check that I like to use which is very accurate and also allows you add your competitors websites allowing you to monitor their backlinks aswell.

Hopefully these tools will help you on your way to becoming a better webmaster!

So you’ve got your new website and you want to promote and get it right up there in the search results.  You’re regularly adding unique content to your site and it’s time to show it to the world.

The amateur webmaster things that the more backlinks you have to your site the better, this is almost correct!  The quality of backlinks grossly outweights the quantity.  The most effective links should be from sites that are related to your own, there’s no value in having a link on a cooking site pointing to your NFL forum.  Yes it counts as a link and they all count but it’s almost worthless.   A few high quality links from sites in your niche will benefit you more than 100 links from low ranking directories.

Types of links

Anchor text is the words used in the link which points to your page or site.  Choose your words wisely as these will be the keywords that search engines notice and associate with your link.  So when someone uses those keywords in the search engines, your link will appear.

Deep Links are just the same as normal links only they point to internal pages of your site instead of your domain.   The benefits of this type linking will increase your search engine ranking for individual pages and not just your home page.  These pages have more of a chance to be included in the search engine results increasing your sites overall awareness.   The varied anchor text used to link to internal pages gives you more keywords to rank for.   Internal links also gives spiders a reason to regularly visit your site and get your whole site indexed instead of the main pages, increasing your overall presence in the results.

Tips for link building

• Trade links with other sites in your niche.  Don’t treat other sites as competition, think of them as friends that will make you stronger.
• Deep links to internal pages as well as links to your domain will benefit you greatly.
• Link bait is when you write an article that will itself attract interest and result in people linking to your article naturally.
• Signature links are links that are placed at the bottom of every post you make on forums.  These links carry relatively no weight but they all add up.
• Comments on other blogs often allow you to add your url.  Don’t spam other blogs with  your links, try to create a friendship with other bloggers in your niche.
• Social Bookmarking is a great way to parade your favourite pages and get them noticed.  Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, etc. are good examples and also help to meet new people with similar interests.
• Link Directories will increase your count easily but the pages that your links are on are very rarely highly ranked and won’t benefit your own rankings at all.

This is by no means the definitive guide but hopefully it will start you on your way to a successful campaign.