How to Use Link Count as a Metric

Incoming links often bring more traffic to your website.

The truism that strength lies in numbers certainly rings true for links pointing to websites. Launching a website and waiting for the search engines to send it to the top of the search engines can be a suspenseful period. While your search keywords are important tools for the search engines to classify your website, the engines rely on links pointing to your site to decide how important your website is. The number of links embedded in your site makes no difference to the spiders that track websites. It's the links coming from other sites that matters to webmasters and site owners. Tracking the links pointing to your website is relatively easy and an exercise that may help you maintain a good position or improve your existing ranking and position.

Instructions

1. Use a website which helps you determine how many other websites have a link pointing back to yours. You have to enter the full URL for your website, your email address and the captcha code. When done, hit the "Check Popularity" button. A new screen appears listing how many links point to your site from others. Write down the number of links you have pointing back to your site.

2. Click the "Details" button to get to a page where you can see where the links to your page come from. Some of these links may be pages coming from within your own website, so it's a good idea to add them up and remove them from the total count.

3. Create a table by hand or set up a spreadsheet to track the number of back links you have. Decide how often you want to track the links. It could be weekly, monthly or quarterly. Set up the columns labeling them for your selected time frame.

4. Designate the rows for the table and use separate rows for the traffic to the website. Most hosting companies provide traffic analysis data you can access through your website's administrative control panel. The statistics include unique visitors and total visitors. You could use either one, although for the purposes of using links as a metric, unique visitors may reveal more about the linking effectiveness in delivering new traffic to your site.

5. Consider tracking your search engine position in the major engines, as well, by entering your keywords in the search box and looking for your site. You can enter your exact position or the page where you find your website.

6. Analyze the data to correlate how your traffic varies depending on the number of incoming links you have for your website. You may find that over time, your traffic increases as the number of links grows and your website position improves. If you enter your data in a spreadsheet, you could use your software tools to create charts to help you see the trends.

Tips & Warnings

• Links coming from authority sites like government, educational or popular sites like newspapers carry more importance with search engines.

References

• Adsighted; The Importance of One Way Backlinks to Your Site; Ella Otis; July 28, 2011
• Open Site Explorer: Answers to Questions About Data Sources, Metrics and More!

Resources

• Add Me: Link Popularity