Links To Your Site
On your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, under the Your Site On The Web tab in the left hand navigation menu, you will be able to view the Links To Your Site.
If the admin area of your own website doesn’t allow you to view this information, as some types of website building programs don’t, then Google Webmaster Tools is the best place to find this out. If you’ve been paying attention to our other Marketing Tips and have been creating profiles across the various social networking sites, building forums, leaving feedback and creating blog entries, then you will have automatically created lots of links back to your website in various different places on the internet.
Obviously, some of the sites you have used to do this will be more popular than others, and thus generate more traffic to you, and Links To Your Site provides this exact information. From this you can determine how popular your links were and any changes you may have to make to your social marketing strategy.
For example, it is good to copy your blog across a number of blog sites, but if one is drastically more popular than another, it might be worth closing the quieter blog down and concentrating your energies on keeping the busier profile open. Equally, some forums will be busier than others, and with some careful analysis, you will be able to streamline exactly what you do and don’t update in order to generate the most amount of fresh, quality traffic and potential customers.
Another aspect to investigating the Links To Your Website is that you will be able to see if anyone else is recommending your site. Perhaps a similar business to your own, or one of your happy customers, has raved about you in a forum and other users have visited to see what the fuss is about. If this occurs, be sure to visit the forum personally and thank them for the review!
Keeping a close eye on these links is useful for lots of reasons, including streamlining your online marketing, monitoring your profiles on other sites and seeing how you and your website are being discussed, but the essential thing to remember is that by doing this, you can see what is working and what isn’t. Ten minutes saved by not updating a certain profile is ten minutes that can be spent creating a more popular one, or thanking a customer for their review in a forum somewhere.