Know Your Links, With a Link Analysis

Okay, you have a new client and now you’re ready to do the marketing for it, which is great…but before you jump start the marketing process, you need to do your research. It’s crucial before you begin any marketing on an established domain that you get your hands dirty and dig into it’s history. The first and important question that you need to ask, is what is this website’s link history?  Does it have any backlinks already pointing to it and if so where did it get them from? Doing a link analysis is important for every new website that you are handed, because doing a link analysis tells you where the website has been and what the owners have done with it in the past.

1. To begin this process, you first need to ask yourself, what kind of links does this website have? Are they .com or .edu? Are they on page 4’s or on page 5’s?  The places where your website has links, can tell you a lot about the domain that you are now working on.  If your company has high powered links that’s a good thing, but if they have low level links especially a ton of them, you need to address this with your client and find out what is going on.
2. Now that you’ve analyzed amount of links, it’s important that you take a look at the link itself.  Asking if the link is followed or no followed is important.  This will tell you if the link has any link juice pointing back to your website.  Also looking at what anchor text the link is using is also important as well.  Does the link say click here or does it say visit us for a free web design consultations tips. This anchor text is important as it serves as signals to Google’s search spiders, that will help your website grow.
3.  Okay, now that we have discovered these links and taken a look at what they look like, the important part is finding out where they are pointing to at your website.  You don’t want to have a 1,000 links pointing to your homepage and only 2 to 3 pointing to your subpage.  Your homepage will always have more links than anything else on your website, but you want a healthy portion of links pointing to the inner pages of your website.  The deeper the linked page, the better.

Just like any second-hand item, you want to know where it’s been and what’s been done with it. The same is true with a website. If you’re handed a website, it’s important that you conduct a link analysis and find out it’s link history before you begin any work.

Tags: Digital Marketing • Search Engine Optimization