Keep track of your campaigns for link popularity building: find out who links to you

What is link popularity and why do you need the link popularity analysis?

Link popularity score is a number that shows how many pages link to a certain page on your site. The major search engines have been widely using it in their algorithms to find out what page is more important and worth assigning higher rankings.

The reasoning behind the link popularity is as follows: the more popular your website is with other websites, the more chances it should be given to rank higher for the same keywords with other things (such as keywords on the page) being equal.

Time and again, webmasters and SEO neophytes ask us why their pages are poorly ranked though they have followed all of the advice provided by WebCEO's SEO analysis tool. More often than not, we see keyword-rich pages lacking inbound links, and it becomes obvious at once they will not rank high on good keywords because their link popularity score is too low.

The Link Popularity Checker tool is essential for building and maintaining your link popularity (read: growing traffic from search engines for your business's success) since it provides a lot of detailed information on who links to you.

Know who links to you

You can instantly find out who links to any page on your site. WebCEO's Link Popularity Checker tool obtains this info by querying the most popular search engines:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• AllTheWeb
• AltaVista
• Baidu
• Fireball, and others

This is just the first step. At the next step you will find out how many sites link to your competitors.

Know how many websites link to your competitors

It is always good to know how your site stacks against competitors. If you didn't pay much attention to the link popularity building, your competitors might outrank you because of a better link popularity. With WebCEO, you can see how many outbound links your competitors enjoy, so you can evaluate if your site can successfully compete with them. Obtaining this report is a matter of minutes.

Identify sites linking to you

The importance of knowing the number of websites linking to you cannot be overestimated, yet it is far more important to know who exactly links to you and its most important pages.

Such advanced analysis will help you track your link popularity growth, and estimate the effect of the effort you put in your link popularity building.

See if the linking sites and their pages are reputable and share your theme. The program will also give you a more detailed report showing all of the pages from a certain domain that link to you.

In addition, if you don't systematically use a buzz-tracking tool such as Google Alerts, Social Mention or Board Tracker, an occasional scanning of backlinks will discover sites where your site, product or service is being discussed, such as websites, forums, news groups, and blogs. So, you will stay in the know about what various resources, communities and groups think of you. As well, you will be able to find sites bad-mouthing you and request the removal of slanderous materials and links.

Think Google: Find out what words and phrases people use to link to your site

Knowing the mere number of linking pages and even their URLs is not enough. Search engines, especially Google, pay a lot of attention also to the words that people click on to move to your site. The HTML name for such words is 'link anchor text', and it has been one of the most important constituents of Google's ranking algorithm for the past few years.

The WebCEO Link Popularity Analysis tool will tell you who links to you and in which way. Web CEO will not only tell you whether the linking page uses text hyperlink or image hyperlink, it will give you also link anchor text and image ALT text, so you will see if the link contains your targeted keyword.

By the way, if you add your competitor's site as a project, you'll have a chance to see if your competitor has a link popularity advantage over you. So if your best keywords are widely used as link anchor texts or image ATL texts to your competitor's site, you should find a way to reach at least parity in this parameter's evaluation.

Discover who links to your competitors but does not link to you

This report is a direct call to action. Enter a few competitor sites' URLs, scan links to them, and you'll surely see that some sites link to more than one competitor, but don't link to you. So the site is very likely to be one of your potential link partners as they would probably want to place a link to your site as well.