Finding Links to Your Web Page and Those of Your Competitors

We've talked all about the importance of link-building and how fostering many, high-quality, and diverse inbound links is probably the singlemost powerful thing you can do to improve your page's search engine rankings. But how do you track who is linking to your page? Also, what if you want to find out who is linking to your competitors? Here are two quick-and-easy tips:

The first and simplest way to get a read on links is by using Google's "link:" operator. Search for "link:yourwebsite.com" and Google will return pages that are linking to the page you include. Even though this is not a complete list you can use it as a good representative sample.

Second, if you're using Google Webmaster Tools (more on that in a later post) it'll give you a fairly comprehensive analysis of the links your site is receiving. Drawback here is that you can only do this for sites you have control over, and not those of your competitors.

A lot of SEO sites out there have their own backlink analysis tools but at the end of the day I find that many of them are based on the Google link: operator and it's equivalents in Yahoo and MSN and just using one of those is good enough for 90% of use cases.

SEOBook's Rank Checker - A Great SEO Tool

If you're wondering how to quickly track how your website ranks for multiple keywords across multiple search engines, look no further than SEOBook's Rank Checker tool.

This Firefox plugin allows you to input various keywords you want to track and then automatically checks in what place you rank for those words. Here's a video that shows you how it works:

Hopefully this saves you time and allows you to track your performance over time (the export to .csv functionality helps you store this data over time).

Use Google Toolbar to View PageRank - SEO Tools

We've talked about the concept of PageRank before - the numerical measure that Google assigns for how important a given page is in the context of the overall web. PageRank is a critical determining factor in how search results are ranked by Google, and therefore a critical component of SEO.

We know how important PageRank is, but how do we know what PageRank is assigned to a given web page? There are a number of tools out there, but one that I find to be useful and convenient is the Google search toolbar. Not only can you easily search from the toolbar, but, among other things, it also shows you what the PageRank is for the page you're currently on.









This is a great way to quickly estimate how valuable a link is that you're receiving by knowing how reputable Google thinks a given page is. That said, pagerank in the toolbar is not always the most up-to-date, and it also doesn't speak to how relevant a specific page might be for a given topic (a page might have a lot of authority but only for a single topic and that might be understated in the single measure of PageRank).

Hope you can add Google Toolbar to your SEO toolbox as yet another valuable SEO tool that makes your analysis quick and effective.

Use Google Analytics as a Tool for SEO

Part of what we want to do here at Daily SEO Tip is to showcase various tools that make you better able to optimize for search engines, and to do so in less time. One such tool that we absolutely love is Google Analytics.

First off, you should have Google Analytics enabled on your site in order to track overall traffic. If you're driving blind it can be quite difficult to steer.

But Google Analytics is so much more when it comes to SEO. It gives you access to all the keywords that drive search traffic to your website as well as summary statistics on the value of each of those keywords (bounce rate, pageviews per visit, etc.). You can also define custom goals (e.g., registration, filled out lead form, made purchase, etc.) and see how traffic from different keywords performs. Of course, you can also monitor your overall level of search traffic and do so for all search engines (not just Google).

Google Analytics also has a very useful blog which I recommend following as they often have great case studies, updates, and tips.

I could dedicated an entire blog just to Google Analytics and how to use it (and in fact, many do!), but the best way to get acquainted with it is to read the product description but then very quickly just start using it. As with most things, the best way to learn is by doing so go on and try it.

Content to Code Ratio (Code to Text) - Reduce Code Bloat on Your Page to Improve SEO

The content to code ratio (or code to text ratio, etc.) refers to how much code your page has relative to how much content (or text). An easy way to see this is by viewing the html source (e.g., View > Page Source in Firefox) and looking at how much code there is relative to how much readable text. Given that search engines look at the code for a given page, bloating that page with a lot of code (which is not contextual), simply dilutes the text that is there, thus lowering your page's relevancy to various keywords you may be targeting.

Why do you have a low content to code ratio? Three typical reasons and solutions include:

• You include Javascript code in the page - move your JS to another file, if you can't do that, move it to the bottom of the page (the lower something is in the page, the less weight it carries with the search engines)
  
• You use a lot of in-line styling - use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), located in an external file, to reduce code
• Formatting using tables - use CSS to create grid layouts instead as it requires less cod

Here's a good tool I found to test the content to code ratio.