10 Link Building Tools for Tracking Inbound Links

Quality inbound links are an essential element of web site marketing and search engine optimization programs to increase traffic and online sales. The greater the number of relevant and authoritative links to a web page, the greater the potential for higher search engine rankings and qualified traffic.

A recent survey from SEOmoz illustrates just how important inbound links are to rankings. An impressive 4 of the top 5 ranking factors involve inbound links:

• Keyword focused anchor text from external links: 73% very high importance
• External link popularity: 71% very high importance
• Diversity of link sources: 67% very high importance
• Trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains: 66% very high importance

Conversely, the No. 2 negative ranking factor was link acquisition from known link brokers or sellers (56% high importance).  Incidentally, TopRank has never engaged in link acquisitions in this manner, focusing instead on earning links through creative content promotions, social media and online public relations.

Tracking links to your web pages — and those of your competitors — is a major part of any SEO strategy. Fortunately, a host of free and paid tools exist to provide a comprehensive looks at where your web pages stand.

Since link building is so important, Lee and I have collected these 10 tools for tracking inbound links for you to test:

1. Majestic-SEO

Majestic-SEO allows users to track link information for any domain – their own sites or those of competitors. Illustrated in the image below, users can access the number of:

• Sub domains
• Pages
• Links
• Referring domains
• Images
• NoFollow links
• Redirects

By verifying ownership of a domain, users can obtain a more detailed report that includes unique links and their anchor text. With registration, the service for your own site is free. Users can buy credits to obtain that same information about other web sites such as competitors. Downloadable data is given on top anchor text, top referring domains and top pages. Plus, the tool offers a “daily update” feature that provides a daily journal of new inbound links.

Majestic SEO

2. BuzzStream Link Building

BuzzStream Link Building focuses on providing tools that help automate redundant tasks in relationship building. It’s a CRM system for link building with applications for SEO as well as online PR.

• Find Contact Info
• Track Email & Twitter
• Manage Link Prospects
• Monitor Backlinks for anchor text, nofollows, outbound links, banned words
• Track activities and conversion rate
• Delegate contacts, split prospecting from outreach

BuzzStream Link Building tools are very robust for link detection, suggestions, relationship management and link management. The BuzzMarker bookmarklet allows easy addition of new link opportunities via the browser. Many other tools focus on link detection, acquisition and the technical site of management. The CRM aspect of BuzzStream and the conversion tracking reports make it unique.

There is a free trial for BuzzStream and monthly costs range from $29/mo to $249/mo. There are also options for Agencies and Enterprise use.

BuzzStream Link Building

3. SEOmoz Linkscape

This inbound link tracking tool offers both a free basic version and an advanced version with a subscription to SEOmoz PRO.

The basic search (illustrated in the image below) allows users to determine the number of inbound links to a page and the number of different domains linking to a page. The tool also gives a ranking of the page based on number and quality of inbound links, as well as a ranking of the domain overall.

In the full version, users can not only judge the quality and quantity of links to their own web pages, but to their competitors as well. Users can compare number of links, number of domains and domain ranking side-by-side against competitor sites.

Users can also determine the keywords competitor sites are targeting in their anchor text and identify competitors’ most powerful links.

SEOMoz Linkscape

4. Raven SEO Tools
Raven is a suite of SEO tools including a Links Manager that allows you to easily manage the link status, contacts and tasks related to each link.

Raven will automatically alert if any changes have occurred on an active link, if the nofollow attribute was added, the anchor text changed, the PageRank changed, or the link was removed. There is team link building management functionality as well as the ability to import, export in CSV format or generate reports online.

A standalone linking too is not available for purchase. The cost for the suite of Raven SEO Tools starts at $79 per month.

Raven SEO Link Builder

5. SoloSEO Link Building Tools
SoloSEO is a collection of SEO campaign management and implementation tools which includes “Links Manager” and “Link Build It!” modules for building and tracking inbound links to your web site.

The Links Manager module helps discover links, assess the strength and quality and track progress. It also includes ongoing link detection and automatic notification if a link is deleted. Link Build It! is a bookmarklet that shows backlink count, PageRank, and Alexa rank for the site, DMOZ listing, .edu or.gov links and the ability to easily add the URL of the page being viewed to the Links Manager.

There is a free trial and the cost for SoloSEO is $29 per month for 5 domains and $4 per domain after.

SoloSEO Links Manager

6. Yahoo! Site Explorer
Yahoo! Site Explorer is a popular, free tool for analyzing and tracking inbound links for users’ own and their competitors’ sites. Users can:

• Determine the number pages within a domain indexed by SLURP, Yahoo’s search engine crawler
• Explore each page to determine inbound links for each
• Exclude inbound links from the domain
• Exclude inbound links from the subdomain
• Export results into a TSV file

Yahoo! Site Explorer

7. Page Inlink Analyzer
Page Inlink Analyzer is a tool created by Eric Miraglia that leverages the Yahoo Site Explorer tool mentioned above in a more useful interface that combines a left side column listing of indexed pages for the site being researched and the inbound links to the focus URL in the right column. This allows the user to quickly research the inbound links to each page of a particular site.

For each inbound link the page level and domain level inlink counts are reported as well as the number of Delicious bookmarks (with a link to view them) for each link and the associated keyword tags.

The Page Inlink Analyzer tool is free.

Page Inlink Analyzer

8. pluginSEO Beta Linking Tools
pluginSEO is a service in Beta that works to simplify SEO and linking tasks by having users input keywords and competitor URLs to generate advice including link building suggestions.

Link features include:

• The Reactor:Links page makes suggestions
• My Links shows inbound links to your own site
• Competitor links documents inbound links to the competing sites entered
• Link suggestions provides a visual listing of new linking opportunities displayed below

pluginSEO is in Beta and is now offering free trials.

pluginSEO

9. Sheer SEO Backlinks Watchdog
Sheer SEO is a set of SEO project management tools, one of which, monitors “guarded” inbound links. The Backlinks Watchdog tool monitors the following link characteristics:

• Anchor text
• Page rank
• Number of outbound links in the referring page
• Availability of the page
• Presence of meta tags “nofollow” and “noindex”
• Existance of the link to your site
• Presense of “nofollow” attribute on the backlink (rel=”nofollow” causes the link not to pass rank)

There is a 90 day free trial for Sheer SEO with paid options ranging from $7 to $40 per month.

Backlink Watchdog

10. HubSpot Website Grader
This free SEO tool provides an overall SEO score for websites based on inbound links, website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other factors. Users submit their website URL, along with competing site URLs, and are then emailed a detailed report that includes:

• Google PageRank and number of Google indexed pages
• Number of inbound links, with the option to analyze links through HubSpot
• Competitive analysis with website grade, Google PageRank, number of inbound links and number of del.icio.us bookmarks

A sample report is shown below.

There are many other link building and tracking tools ranging from the SEOBook toolbarand Backlink Harvester to SEO Spyglass Link Assistant. These 10 should be a good start.

What web based or desktop software tools have you found to be useful for tracking inbound links?

 For More Information , Please Visit Us : http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/1-seo-tools-for-tracking-inbound-links/

Importance of Portfolio for Any Organization

Web Design Portfolio

A website is the identification of your work which brings in business to your company. For example if you provide any type of services then it flashes on the first page of your website. This allows the other organizations to choose the services they need. A well designed and properly laid portfolio display your work to the audience who want to know more about your company. Your beautifully laid web design portfolio can replace the words by showcase of your work.

Whenever an organizer comes to a website in search of services he goes to the portfolio page first instead of reading about the company. A well set web design portfolio gives a better idea of the services provided by your company. It also helps to give the organizers the idea on whether the company will be able to meet their requirement and also how good are they at their job.

It is important for any individual or company to focus on their portfolio. Portfolio is like a booklet which informs about your profession in image format usually one after another. Not only your website should look attractive but also the portfolio should look attractive in a professional manner.  Each work done should be displayed clearly so that your new clients are able to judge you by the beauty of work you have done before. Your portfolio can be set as slide show or by click. It is nice to keep the presentation of your premium customers on the top. This can make the new clients feel safe and find the company trustworthy.

In today’s world visual appeal plays more important role than the skill shown in form of words. The clients who would like to hire your company’s service will judge your skills and ability through the portfolio i.e. work done for your previous clients instead of services written on your homepage.   Most of the time you will find clients who have come through the references of your previous clients.

In order to get more business it is important to design the portfolio in such a manner that it is easily available with easy navigation pages so that the client can have a good look on the different services catered by them. The link of the portfolio should either be on the header or footer of your website so that the visitors are able to reach your portfolio in one click. Showcasing the portfolio is also a part of promoting your business and also creating awareness among people about your work and services that you offer.

Looking for web Design Companies which can help you design a unique portfolio so that you can attract new clients?  Contact Red Chilli Media, an impressive web design company which can help you organize your work in a creative manner. The layout and showcasing tools used by the experts can definitely accelerate the growth of your company or profession.

Why Google Banned Websites?

It's a simple question... Are you asking Google to penalize your website?

I'm sure you're probably thinking; Well, of course not! Yet daily I see new people complaining in search engine optimization forums that their websites have been banned by Google and they "have no idea why".

These people claim they've done nothing wrong and are absolutely clueless as to why their site is no longer in Google. The purpose of this article is to teach you one VERY important thing.

What NOT to do when optimizing your website, to make sure you don't get banned.

How do you know if you've been banned?

First let me show you how to see if you're clearly banned by Google. Often times people think they've been banned, when in reality they've just dropped in ranking and can't find their website.

There are a couple of things you can do.

• Check Google's search results.
• View the Google toolbar.

Check Google's search results

Go to Google and enter your entire URL into Google's search box. In this example we'll use a made up domain name. (www.jkhljkhkjh.com). On a side note, I tried www.somerandomdomain.com and www.fakedomainname.com and both were already taken. Apparently we've got some creative people out there... :-)

Anyway, we'll go to Google and enter our entire URL and click "search"
http://www.jkhljkhkjh.com

Notice that Google says there is no information available for this URL? This means that the URL is no longer in Google's database (a.k.a. index)

If you enter a brand new website into Google, you'll always get this message until the website has been indexed. But, in this case, the website we entered has been banned by Google for some reason is either banned or is brand new. If we know our website was once in Google and do the search I just showed you above, and Google says "Sorry, no information is available for URL [whatever your URL is]", then chances are... you're banned.

Another way you can quickly see if your website has been banned is by:

Viewing the Google Toolbar

Download the Google Toolbar here: http://toolbar.google.com

Once it's installed, simply visit your website. If the Google toolbar is completely gray, this may meen that you have been banned by Google.

Banned:

Not Banned:

Ok, so now we know how to tell if our website has been banned.

Why your website banned?

There are many onpage ranking factors AND offpage ranking factors that can cause Google to ban your website. Before I begin, I want you to know that many websites still get away with doing some of these things. They DO NOT help your rankings and are simply a waste of time, so don't try them. Sooner or later Google will catch up to these websites and will remove them.

It's just not worth the risk when doing them no longer helps your ranking to begin with.

Hidden Text

Hidden Text is simply text that users can't see when they visit your webpage. Some webmasters will do this so that they can add keywords throughout their webpage without it interferring with what the visitors actually see. Yet, the search engines can still see hidden text.

For example, let's say you have a white background on your website. If you wanted to hide text, you would simply make the color of your text white (#FFFFFF) and users couldn't see it.

I did a quick search in Google and quickly found an example of a website using hidden text. Have a look below:

At first glance, you're probably wondering where the hidden text is...

Let me show you. I went to the website and clicked "ctrl + a" on my keyboard. This will highlight the entire webpage as shown below:

Now we can clearly see the hidden text at the very top left side of their website that says "fat loss body fat abs weight loss diets bodybuilding dieting tips abdominal".

These are keywords that they want to rank well for and want the search engines to see when they first visit their website. Yet, they don't want their visitors to see this text. So, they've made the text white, to blend in with the background.

Alt image tag spamming

This is another way that people will try to cram keywords into their website, allowing search engines to see their keywords, but not allowing visitors to notice any difference in their website.

The following is a website that wanted to rank well for "cabbage soup diet". What they've done is inserted a graphic of a cabbage. They've then added an alt image tag to the graphic. When a visitors visits the website, and hovers their mouse over the cabbage soup graphic, a little popup will appear.

Notice how many times they've repeated the word "cabbage soup" and "cabbage"? Way too many! It serves no purpose other than to cram as many keywords as possible into their webpage.

The real purpose of an alt image tag is if a user visits your website and the graphic will not load, or is disabled by their web browser, text will appear instead of the graphic. This is often used for blind people.

Alt image spamming is something you want to stay clear of. Using alt image tags are good, but you can overdo it, as you can see above. A good alt image tag in this case would simply be: cabbage soup diet graphic

Meta Tag Stuffing

What I'm referring to here is when people throw in thousands of the same exact keyword into their meta tags.

For example, the following website is trying to rank well for the keyword "tents".

<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents,tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents tents, TENTS, Tents, tents tents tent supplies, tents, tents tent, tent, Tent, TENTS, tents, Tents">

This is obviously ridiculous. Google, and other search engines no longer use Meta Tags to rank websites.

Google WILL penalize it, and it WILL NOT help you... so, why would anyone do something like this?

Stay away from it.

Title Tag Stuffing

The title is what appears in the top left hand corner of your webpage. Below is an example of Title Tag Stuffing.

Don't do it... You only need to include your keyword(s) one time in your title tag.

Anymore than 1 time will only dilute the effect, and if you overdo it as shown above, you may get severely penalized and drop in the rankings.

Those are just a few of the things that people are continuing to do online. These things WILL eventually get your website banned or penalized and WILL NOT help you rank well. It's just a waste of time and effort, plus it's just plain ignorant to waste your time on something that doesn't work and will get your website banned from the search engines anyway.

For More Information Please Visit Us : http://www.seomaterial.com/seo_articles/google_banned_websites.html.

Link Bait Definition, Methods & Types

To be on top of a search engine ranking is the goal of most websites. A search engine ranking’s main purpose is to separate the more improved websites from the junk websites. This is primarily done by the search engines to provide their users with appropriate and significant results as well as quality content.

To be set apart from the herd and to stand out among the millions of websites, a website owner has to think of ways to gain link popularity. Link popularity is a very vital factor used by search engines to determine the rank of a webpage. Link popularity is measured by the number of links made by other websites to your website.

Why is it so important to have link popularity and why would website owners want to make it to the top as far as search engine ranking is concerned? The most obvious reason for this is that the higher the ranking, the more traffic the search engine is sending your way. If your website’s primary purpose is to promote an online business, think of the saving you can make on your advertising budget because of the potential clients the search engine is sending your way.

Link building or link popularity can be effectively achieved through the link bait strategy. A website who cannot create links naturally must try to make use of the link bait idea. Link bait is an effective tool to increase traffic in your website. More often than not, link bait is a part of a search engine optimization plan. Link bait is any feature or content in a website that attracts or lures other websites to link to that particular website. Link bait should be interesting enough to catch other people’s attention and to entice them to make a link.

For a link bait to be successful and to get the expected result of generating more traffic, a link baiter can make use of several hooks. Link baiting can take the form of news, informational, humor, contrary and fear contents.

News hook – making your site the source of news tidbits and fresh information is one way of generating the much coveted traffic. Being the first to make a scoop on a current event will entice other webmasters to make a link to your website. News readers will turn to your website every time they want to know what is happening around the community and around the world.

For More Information , Please visit us at: http://wmink.net/internet-marketing/link-bait-definition-methods/

How to Attract Visitors through Website Design Creativity

Web Design Services

With technological advancement and competition of promoting companies and products online, websites have become an integral part of everyone life. But just by creating a website helps you to attract your customers? If the answer is no then it means that your website lacks the creativity and attractive design.

Now the questions that come to your mind is that how can I design my website? These following points may help you to answer your questions.

These are some latest new trends which will help you to design your website -

§  HTML5- Hypertext Markup Language is a language tool used for building web pages. The latest trend is of HTML5 which is an updated version to structure the language of web content. It is more easily readable and understandable. This is the fifth revised version of HTML proposed by opera software. It has been built in a way keeping in mind that it could run on low power devices as well like that of Smart phones, mobiles and tablets. HTML5 have some new features like audio, video, canvas and Scalable Vector Graphic contents which can replace the generic tags. HTML5 has made the web pages more semantic and now the search will be lot easier to use.

§  CSS3- Cascading Style Sheet is used to give a symmetrical look and formatting to the web content which is written in a markup language. It adds colour, font, layout and flexibility to the presentation of the web page. The upgraded version of CSS is the CSS3. The latest version has some new features such as new selectors and properties which have made styling and layout much easier than the earlier version.

§  Fire Work- Adobe fire work is a vector graphic editor which provides web designers with various features like - Hierarchical Layers, Smart Guides, Slice Scaling, Symbols, Image Optimization and States.

§  Dreamweaver- It is a commercial application for web development. It has various features which help in making the team work easy and as a result will make work faster. Some of the features are- a built-in FTP client, syntax highlighting and very smart Code Hinting, project management and workflow options. It has made updating and editing very easy.

§  Adobe Photoshop- A commercial graphic editor used for manipulating images and creating graphics. One can filter; edit the image according to the need. It can also repair your old torn images. It provides options such as-filters; brushes, layer comp and revert option.

§  Firebug- It helps to edit or find error in the HTML and Java Script. It also helps in restoring old HTML elements and then allows you to edit them live on web page.

These points must have given you an insight of how to beautify your website design, but still need professional help then, why not contact Red Chilli media which have a team of experienced professional web designers.