Six and a half years ago (which is ages, in Internet years), Robin Nobles, Eric Ward, and John Alexander compiled a legendary list of 131 legitimate link building strategies. Four years later, Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans published 101 link building tips to market your website, which was inspired by the other article. Considering the furiously changing face of search engine marketing and with 2009 already ahead of us, I thought it was time to evaluate both lists and create an updated collection of link building strategies.

7 Internal link building strategies

10 Easy link building starters

12 Old school link building techniques

12 Places to submit your URL to

12 Ways to make people write about you

12 Common business tactics

4 Important considerations

Source…

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!

Maybe not today or next week but I think this will change in the future.

I was doing some link building today and I had a thought about link directories – Are they going to come round and bite us in the ass in 5 years time?

Everyone now knows that link farms and systems set up to rotate links in your footer are frowned upon by Google and we get penalised for it. Are link directories going to be the same? There are thousands, possibly millions of link directories on the web and there’s never a shortage of new ones popping up daily. Webmasters see it as an quick way to get backlinks and when using auto submission tools it’s even easier. So if Google do change their view on link directories, most of us are in for a shock when our rankings start to fall.

But I guess we all know the big search engines have their own directories and then there’s places like DMOZ, etc. so is this really going to happen? I guess the only thing to do is wait and see!