Everyone in blogging and internet marketing knows the importance of backlinks and tools that people use to gain backlinks, are they worth it?
Before discussing the link popularity tool, let’s discuss link popularity itself. What is it? Link popularity basically refers to the total number of web pages which link to your web site or any of its individual pages. The reason it is so important is because this is one of the main factors that search engines use to evaluate your website and where it will be ranked. If your website is ranked high with the search engines, you will come up in the first results when a potential customer goes online and searches for what your business offers. That’s why webmasters are concerned with their link popularity.
So what is a link popularity tool? It depends on the tool. There are many facets to link popularity and link building so there are tools that correspond to those aspects. Some tools will perform an analysis on the various search engines to show you how many pages are linking to your site. They can also tell you which pages are linking. Some will actually give you a score so you can judge how well you are doing. Some will give you the opportunity to compare your site to others. Most free tools will only give you the results from the biggest search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
You’ll probably notice that the amount of links varies significantly from search engine to search engine because the figures displayed represent the number of inbound-links that are known to each search engine in particular and will vary based on the size of its database. Search engines also figure out certain inbound-links (again, this varies according to the search engine) so certain backlinks may not figure into the total.
While you don’t want to become obsessed with using this tool or checking the data all the time, it is important to keep tabs on your links. You want to keep your links as high-quality and relevant as possible and knowing where they are coming from can help you manage that information.
After you analyze the information that you get from your tool, you can then continue on with your link building strategy. Many tools are also connected or related to other services that can help you with this realm of link-building as well. Just remember that the same rules apply if you should decide to go with a link building service to take care of that aspect of your business. You want to get a quality service so make sure you do your research in order to get the most bang for your buck. While many link-building tools are free, link building services are definitely not. However, what they save you in time and effort could very much be worth it in terms of cash.
By all means, take advantage of a link popularity tool and then decide if you plan to go as far as to hire someone else to handle your backlink strategy.