Friday, July 24, 2009

Organic Search: Inbound & Outbound linking to and from your website

Overall (dependent on your objectives), organic, long term SEO is by far more effective than short-term pay-per-click or pay-per-view advertising (PPC/PPV). Your website ranking depends on at least 75% organic search terms, and inbound linking has a massive influence towards this.

For the main 3 worldwide search engines by search volume, I have listed the simple methods you can use to find out which links are inbound to your domain and which ones are external from your domain. If anyone knows more about Bing let me know, as I'm still searching.

The best place to measure inbound links for your own site is within a Google Webmaster account, or if you can't access that or it takes too much time, try the below:

Simply type in the following in the Google search field to measure ALL your inbound and outbound links:
http://[your domain name]

For specific inbound links (to your site), enter: link:[yourdomainname.com] into Google Search.
For specific outbound links (from your site), enter: site:[yourdomainname.com] into Google Search.

Example: BBC is a great example of solid inbound links, their site has 24,500 - a massive amount in comparison to most sites. Only 1,650 for YouTube. But the outbound changes dramatically:
YouTube - 913,000,000 (Yes nearly 1billion!)
BBC - 31,400,000

http://[your domain name] - Allows you to sort by either of the below:
For specific inbound links (to your site), enter: linkdomain:[your domain name] into Yahoo Search.
For specific outbound links (from your site), enter: site:[your domain name] into Yahoo Search.

Bing - ?!!?

Useful link for all of the above: www.selfseo.com (Self SEO)

Then there is a big difference between powerful and not so powerful links. Receiving inbound links from popular, relevant and reputable websites is obviously a winner on this front. And one of the most important factors for achieving top positions in search engines is through your volume of 'quality' links.



2 comments:

Wighty said...

I found the Bing link, you can either go to: www.linkpopularity.com OR login to their webmaster service: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/WebmasterAddSitesPage.aspx

Wighty said...

Thanks for the links/comments Andy. But shouldn't SEO consideration be considered during the design process, rather than waiting for design to finish and then start SEO. Isn't it wiser to combine both throughout the whole website development process?