How do you know if your site is gaining back links? You have to check, of course. But, to the new webmaster, this can often seem a daunting task especially with the constantly changing search engine rules.

When you’re effectively implementing a linking strategy for your website, essentially what you’re doing is creating link relationships between your content and your keyword search terms.

An important aspect of a linking strategy is being able to check for back links and to know how well your site is performing in the search indexes.

Below, I’ve outlined how you can effectively search for back links using your article titles and keyword phrases.

Effectively Searching for Backlinks

The only software that I ever recommend using in your link building campaigns is SEO Elite and/or Keyword Elite. While they are a bit pricey, if you’re going to engage in a long-term linking campaign, these tools are priceless. They allow you to search out effective keyword phrases, research competition, and help you define your linking strategies.

However, don’t worry if you don’t have these two pieces of software. I want to first note, that the “link:” command in Google doesn’t work. Google has even said that it doesn’t work correctly. Why? Because they don’t want anyone to crack their search algo. So, you can certainly use the link: command, but it’s not accurate and it changes constantly. You’ll be frustrated if you rely on this only.

The easiest way to check for backlinks is to search on the titles of any articles you’ve submitted. If you’ve submitted your articles to high PageRank sites, your articles should get indexed fairly quickly. Once they’re indexed, you will be able to search on the article title and see where you’ve been picked up. Believe it or not, there are many people who constantly grab new content that shows up in article directories.

Another technique for finding back links is to do a search on your website name. So, you would search “yourdomain” or whatever page you’re linking to in your articles and links submissions.

The last technique you can use to search for back links is a combination of your keyword phrases and domain name. Keep in mind that if you want a keyword phrase to actually show up as the phrase, you’ll have to put quotes (“keyword”) around it. Otherwise, you get too many results and it will confuse or make you think you have more links and you really do.

One thing to keep in mind is that there’s a difference between getting indexed and getting credit for a link in the search engines. You may find that after a few days your articles are starting to get indexed. This is a good thing but it also can be misleading.

It may take up to 30 days for your website to get credit for the link. A lot of people get excited when they see that they’re starting to get some traffic from the articles they placed or links they submitted. Then they panic when the traffic drops off or ebbs from an influx of traffic. At this point, most website owners think these techniques simply don’t work and quit.

However, if you understand that linking is an ongoing process, you’ll understand that that a loss of traffic is part of the process. You’ll understand that it’s the cumulative effect of your efforts that will continue to drive your search results higher, thus increasing your traffic.

While I highly recommend using the “Elite” software products to find backlinks for your website, you can still use the techniques I’ve outlined above to search for your links and to ensure that your linking strategy is working like it should be.

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Every day, there is a growing number of web directories. Many wonder if the market is being oversaturated. While there are a lot of directories that are not very noteworthy, the others are absolutely worth using for both people doing searches, or for webmasters trying to promote their site.

Directories are very useful those who are searching for information and don’t want to use the big search engines, but are looking for perhaps a smaller, specialized site that may not rank on the first page or two of a given search.

If you have no more than a general idea of what you are looking for then you can use the search form when exploring a directory, remember that you are not searching the text of the actual WebPages of a particular site. Instead you are searching the text contained in the site title and the description of the site. These titles and descriptions are made by the websites owner and sometimes by the directory webmaster.

It is important to be sure that when you do the search, you use the option search within directory, and not search the net. If you choose search the net, it will take you to a major search engine and out of the directory that you have been using.

It is possible to look for a website by not using the search option. The first page of most directories has a list of general categories like arts, internet, health, etc. From there, you can click the category you want and it will take you to a list of subcategories which are more specific.

It is important to note that once you have entered the subcategory, the results are usually displayed by page rank, alphabetical order, or in chronological order of when the website was submitted to the directory.

Directories usually come in two forms, general, or niche. The general directory is good for basically all websites. An example of a general directory can be found at www.sitesofnote.com. The niche websites are great for specializing in one specific theme. An example of this kind is the audiobook and ebook directory www.audiobookhq.com .

For webmasters, directories are a very important tool. One thing that submitting your website to a directory can do is bring increased traffic from people searching the directory for specific topics.

If you have a website selling baby clothes, and there is a person searching the directory for the category clothing, and then the subcategory babies, then they can find your site which is a fit for what they were looking for.

Another benefit of using for directories for webmaster is they can increase your page rank and can increase the trust that major search engines have in your site. The more quality incoming links to your site, then they higher your page rank will be and this will lead to your site listing higher on organic searches on major search engines.

While some may say there are too many web directories out there, I disagree. Directories are both useful for someone searching for a website that fits their need, and for webmasters who want to help promote their websites. If you have not yet discovered how a directory can help you, I urge you to get started on using them today.

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