SEO analysis for dummies: links

What follows are the basic few steps I start with when analysing a site:

1/ Checking backlinks (also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links – basically they’re pages that link to your website/page)

Use a Google Advanced Search: for example http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_lq=google.com&btnG=Search

The basic idea here is to see what websites link to your website. Google (and other Search Engines) use both the number of links and the weight of the website linking to you. I.e the more popular the site that links to you, the more ‘weight’ it adds to your website, the more ‘weight’ your website has the higher up the search ranking your site will be. There are even more complicated factors involved in this algorithm but it’s probably too in depth for this brief guide.

2/ Assuming you have some websites/pages that link to your website it’s a good idea to analyse them for quality. Ideally you want links from reputable websites with a good amount of visitors, this ensures that some of there kudos ‘rubs’ off on you when they link to you.

I’ll continue this subject in another post as I want to cover keyword usage, link formatting and optimising websites…

  • I think such basic SEO audit should start from onsite characteristics like titles, descriptions, web copy, semantics, interlinking and then move on the backlinks, popularity etc offline factors.
  • I should have been more specific with the title, I've updated it now. This was an edited bit of advice I sent to a friend who manages his own website, and as I had wanted to put something on here about SEO I decided it was easier to start with something I had already written...
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