SEO Master: Tips And Tricks For Link Analysis

The benefits of your link data can be cultivated through smart and intensive analysis. Data derived from links allows the SEO master to better optimize strategies and leverage links for actionable results and insights. In order to maximize results, the metrics available for link research must be used properly and efficiently. These tips and tricks will help your link analysis and drive traffic to your site.

Link Ranking:

Many SEO consultants save themselves time by simply searching for a handful of relevant keywords, taking the first results on a search engine results page, and reversing the backlinks to try to secure those links for their own websites. There are a few problems with this approach. You can never really tell whether those backlinks are helping or hurting a site, or whether those links contributed to a site’s ranking. When you ask yourself who might be linking to these high ranking websites, you should also ask yourself who would link to these websites. In other words, take on the role of an SEO detective, so to speak. Follow a high ranking websites backlinks all the way through to the source, ensuring that these links are, in fact, high in quality and not paid, spam links, the byproduct of a link wheel, or churn-style content marketing.

Link Profiling:

After you’ve sifted through good, authoritative links and the slush, you should consider the distribution of inbound links to a particular domain. Disparities in distribution will often draw attention to aspects of linking that would have, otherwise, gone unnoticed. Link profiling helps identify anchor text distribution, link quality, and on-site targeting.

Keyword Tag Cloud:

Creating a cloud of keyword tags provides an easy way to visualize the distribution of keywords on a website and, moreover, focus on the specific terms being targeted. Highlighting major, targeted keywords and demonstrating the significance of anchor text are important factors of a website’s overall link analysis. You can do this with online tools or software, which will display the tag cloud in an easy, visual manner for analysis.

Name Matching:

Domains are quite literally how users refer to and find a particular website. Domain names need little explanation, aside from the three essential parts: top-level, domain name, and subdomain, which is optional. As long as all of these are comparable, a website’s domain will function properly. Sometimes, domain names run into a few challenges, however. Language barriers and foreign naming might pose difficulties in establishing your domain. Plenty of name matching tools exist to help alleviate these issues, and can also be used in link profiling to help identify the company behind the domain name. When all aspects of a website’s title and name are in line, link analysis will be much easier and less cluttered than otherwise.

Link analysis is a very time consuming, detailed work that requires a professional eye, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make it easier. Utilize the tools and software available to help you properly analyze what links are golden and what links are toxic and need to be removed. Of course, it’s a lot easier to have quality links to begin with than to take down already-established connections, but without finding and removing those links, your SEO will suffer.