Why your website needs a Link Audit?

Irrespective of whether you have done any active link building or not, chances are your website has a considerable amount of natural, one-way links connecting to it. These natural links develop over time as other websites gradually start linking to your site. It may be through a blog comment, a review of one of your products/services on a social networking site or a mention of your company in an online publication. Such links just happen to occur without roping in any extraneous SEO effort. 

Now, the idea behind a link audit is to determine your link building baseline; identify what kind of links your website has and what sources they are coming from. It pins down every type of link that may have attached itself to your site – the good, the bad and the ugly ones.

Now, one can ask as to why they need to opt for a link audit? For any website it is important to understand its link graph. One ought to know things like ‘How many links connect to a website?’, ‘Where are they coming from?’, and ‘Which page does a link point to?’ the type of text used in the link that points to your site and so on. Answers to these questions often reflect the reason behind the position and ranking of your website on a search engine.  

If you have employed a link building effort, it is essential to evaluate every single link to understand its true merit to your website. If you are planning to opt for a link building exercise, make sure to first understand you website’s existing link profile. For a precise link audit, one can simply make use of Google Web Master Tools. It is a free tool which enlists the type and source of a link that connects to your site. One can also make use of Link Diagnosis tool which gives pretty much the same details.

The bottom line is that a link audit gives you a clear picture of where your website stands in terms of back links, and what it could do to improve upon the same. To maximize the scope of links, you will need to bank on every linking opportunity a search engine provides you. Your links may come from the search index, Netscape’s open directory, paid database from Adwords program or paid database from banner advertiser.  A link could germinate from any of these possibilities. It is then up to you to gauge where you would want your links coming from and how these links can improve your existing link profile; for; in the end, a link can significantly affect your ranking and visibility quotient in a search engine.

Webmarketing123 is a California based Internet Marketing Firm which provides a host of services like SEO,PPC, SMM and ESM(Enterprise Search Marketing)

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