Links back to your website are an important part of online brand management. And while many people engage in the practice of building links, very few actually understand the value that this brings to their brand.
Sadly, we have oversimplified the benefit of many SEO techniques. We have put them in the category of "higher search rankings" without understanding their larger benefit. And with backlinks in particular, we have become so one-sided in our application that we rarely, if ever, talk about its benefits for brand research. Today, I want to spend a bit of time helping you get started gathering information and analyzing your findings.
Let's start by pulling up a list of links back to my site. There are several ways to find this information, but Yahoo seems to have the best search options with the most user friendly interface. Let's walk through an example:
Here, I have entered a search string that will pull up outside links back to my domain. You can see that I have entered a "-site:edgyentrepreneur.com" phrase. Theoretically, that will exclude interlinks from one of the posts of my site to another. In practical application, some seem to sneak by...
Yahoo returns with a list:
This is just a portion of the links for my site...I have 500+, which is a really small amount compared to my other sites. This gives me my first bit of pertinent information: I have really neglected this strategy as a way to promote the Edgy Entrepreneur brand online.
Next, I see that many of the links are from social media sites: various profiles, microblog aggregators and social bookmarking sites. This is actually a good thing, since many of my posts are about using the web to build business. The other thing that I discovered is that each time a link is posted on some of these sites, it remains in place for a significant amount of time. This is important because it helps me prioritize my link posting efforts.
Finally, I see other blogs and websites that have linked back to me. Identifying other non-social media sites that are interested in my content is an easy way to do a bit of market research. It also gives me a sense of community allies and ideas for future partnerships. And, it alerts me to negative commentary/concerns on the horizon.
Yahoo's advanced search has the ability to be much more sophisticated in its results. If you feel like playing around with the features you can drill down to a much more specific level of information. But, it isn't necessary to use all of the bells and whistles to generate valuable brand management information. Analyzing your incoming links should be at least an occasional component in your web marketing plan. Give it a try, you will be surprised at what you learn!
