Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

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these sites and document them in your Link Tracking Worksheet. Here are the steps

you’ll take:

• Document inbound links.

• Assess existing link quality.

Document Inbound Links

On your Link Tracking Worksheet, you will see a section for existing inbound links.

Today you’ll identify the URLs of the first 10 or so sites that are linking to each of

your landing pages. Ten should be plenty to work with for now—you will build on this

list throughout your SEO Plan.

Find the URLs using one of the following three methods:

• On the search engine of your choice, perform the special search you learned in

Chapter 6 for finding inbound links.

• If you have access to a website statistics program, review it for referring URLs.

• Use a backlink analysis tool, such as the Neat-O Backlink Tool built by the kind

people of We Build Pages,

www.webuildpages.com/tools/

. This tool provides

backlink URLs and also the text that the linking sites are using to link to you.

Like the title says, the tool is neat-o!

Perform this step for each of your landing pages, ignoring links coming from

your own site. If your site has no incoming links from other sites, you can skip the rest

of today’s task!

Assess Existing Link Quality

As we briefly discussed in Chapter 6, search engines care about the quality as well as

the quantity of inbound links. And you care, too, because a link is a direct pathway for

potential customers to get to your site. Today you’ll ask a few key questions about your

linking sites that will help you determine if each link is going to help the right audience

find the right page on your site. Later this week, we’ll show you how to write to site

owners to request changes to any problematic listings you discover.

The following key questions will help you assess the quality of your inbound

links. It may seem like a lot to think about, but once you get a feel for it, you won’t

need the checklist. In fact, you’ll probably be able to assess each link within 30 seconds

of opening the page.

Now:

Open your Link Tracking Worksheet and fill in existing linking site URLs for each of your land-

ing pages.

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