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The link analyzer tool is a fantastic search engine optimization utility that can help you improve your site's SEO, and subsequently improve your website's ranking in the results pages of search engines. To use this tool, simply enter in the URL of the website you're trying to analyze, fill in the security code which is used to prevent a wave of requests from crashing our servers, and it will give you several detailed readouts of information about how many links your site contains. It will break them down into several categories, most notably for SEO purposes are internal and external links.
These links are important because search engines actually take them into consideration when deciding who shows up on the first page of their search results. The idea is that if more people link back to you then you are a more widely trusted source of information, and therefore search engines will send you more traffic expecting you to be able to answer the questions people are asking. Of course, it's a little more complex than this, so let's take a look at the different types of links, and why they're so important.
Internal Links
Internal links are the links your site contains that go from one page to another within the site. Search engines take a look at your website using what is called a spider, which is an automated server that scans the content on websites all across the web and tries to record it. Then, the search engines have formulas that try to make sense of all the data about all the websites it found. One of the things the spiders can see and take note of is any kind of links, whether in plain text or embedded as hyperlinks, your site contains.
The links that lead to your own site include links in your posts or content that lead to other pieces of work on your own site. Internal links also include any links in your site's navigation bar that lead to other directory pages within your website. This is probably the main motivation for search engines to keep track of how many internal links your site contains, is as a way to ensure that the websites they're sending people to are properly mapped out and easy to navigate.
External Links
External links are just what you would expect them to be. They come in two forms, incoming, and outgoing external links. Outgoing external links are links in your site or content that lead to other parts of sites that don't belong to yours. These are important to have because search engine algorithms seem to tend towards websites that have a one to one ratio of internal to external links like this. As a rule of thumb for bloggers, each 500 to 1000 words should contain one internal links and one outgoing external link.
The other type of external link, which are not shown here but other tools are available can show you, are often called backlinks. These are links from other websites that lead to yours and are vitally important for ranking in any search engine on any keyword. This is the ultimate sign of trust a website can give another website and lets the search engines know who is being talked about and who the experts on a subject are. If you want to be competitive in the SEO world and rank high on search results then having great backlinks is also something you should look into. This tool can only show you internal and external links, but these are also very important to optimize.
How to Increase Internal Links
On-site SEO is one of the most often overlooked elements of the process of getting your site or pages to rank on the first page of search engines. Internal links are the search engine's way of ensuring that visitors it sends to your site will be able to easily navigate their way around once they're sent there. It is very important to have a good number of internal links if you're trying to rank within the first few pages of search results.
The absolute minimum number of internal links your website should have is one going from each and every directory page to every one of your other directory pages. This is the minimum number of internal links required for any kind of site. If your site has a blog, then each blog post should also contain at least one link to another blog post on your own site. The link should be embedded into hypertext that features relevant text, perhaps even an exact keyword. These embedded links can be seen by the search engine spiders that crawl your site looking for information, and it will count that towards your internal links. This shows the search engines that your site is doing a good job of directing visitors to more potentially helpful or interesting content.
The added benefit of inserting links within your articles to other articles on your own site is that it increases the amount of time and the number of pages a visitor will see on average when they visit your site. This will increase your popularity, page rank, and search engine optimization all at once. With all of these benefits, there's no reason not to be including internal links in your content.
How to Increase External Links
There are a number of theories going around as to what the best practice is for optimizing how many and what kind of external links your site has. Some people seem to believe that for the time being more is better and having as many links as possible is a good idea, as many as one external links per 100 words. Others say that having too many could be detrimental or cause search engines to misunderstand the purpose of your website, leading them to not show you on search results at all.
Most likely, search engines have started including this feature as a way of ensuring that people featured high on the search results pages will be someone who is doing their research and linking back to citations on the topic. So, to optimize your site and content for this, just do exactly what they want you to do. If you include citations in your content that link back to an authority on the topic your external links will start to climb naturally, leading to greater search engine optimization.
How to get High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are a third very important type of link which are not discussed in the link analyzer tool but are looked at in other tools on this site. They are links coming to your site from elsewhere on the web. This shows search engines that other sites are putting their trust in your content by sending their viewers there. Having a good number and a high quality of these links can help raise your search results ranking substantially. There are a number of ways to increase these kinds of links, so here are some helpful ideas to get you started.
Be warned though, there are no gimmicks when it comes to search engine optimization. No shortcuts exist. If you want to raise your search result rankings you'll need to put in real work.
1 - Post Quality Content
This may seem obvious, but the best way to get more backlinks on your site is to post the highest quality content possible. This way, more people will see your content and share it which leads to more backlinks. Every facebook post that leads to your site or post is another fairly highly weighted backlink that search engines will see and take into consideration when deciding who shows up how on the search results.
The search engines also have a system of weighting backlinks from certain sources more than others, namely those who either have more backlinks themselves or are a .gov or .edu site. This is done to prevent people from exploiting this aspect of the algorithm and creating huge amounts of fake websites to generate fake backlinks. It would be very difficult for someone to fake a large number of .gov or .edu backlinks, so these must be earned for real. This is why having great content is so pivotal, because if nobody is sharing your content and linking back to it on their sites, then it will not rank well no matter how many times your posts use the keywords.
2 - Post Original Infographics
Almost everyone has seen an amazing infographic and immediately gone to share it on social media. Visuals are intrinsically engaging and are incredibly shareable. This makes them ideal for anyone trying to improve their search engine optimization by increasing their number of quality backlinks. Tons of people will share a good and interesting infographic, but they can be hard to make both engaging, visually appealing, and educational. If you pull it off though, the payout can be tremendous.
As mentioned the types of backlinks you get are weighted so it's not all about sheer volume. Sites with a high page authority, or sites that already have a ton of backlinks, will raise your web standing more than a small website will. Luckily, huge websites like Wikipedia will often post infographics and credit the site they come from, giving a huge boost to your website's ranking.
3 - Conquer Social Media
The wider of a net you cast the bigger your web presence will be. By expanding your internet presence into the social media sphere you can earn a ton of backlinks for your website. By combining the powers of the social media and the infographics SEO strategies you can cover your bases with both a high volume of social media backlinks and some high-quality backlinks as well when bigger websites share and credit your infographic. This combined strategy is basically one hundred percent necessary when it comes to trying to rank within the first page of any search result.
You can also increase the number of external links on your site by links out of your website but straight to one of your social media accounts. This is a great way to increase the amount of time people are looking at your content, but also diversify where they are spending their time while enhancing your website's search engine optimization.
How to Best Use This Tool to Optimize your Website
This tool does not cover other websites to find how many times other sites link back to you, however, there are other tools that will. This tool strictly deals with links that are on your site. These links can either lead to other pages of your own site or to pages on an entirely different site. Depending on which of these is the case search engines will weigh it differently.
It is still not entirely understood exactly how external links are weighted, but it is widely agreed upon that they are important. A safe bet is to start including one external link every 500 to 1000 words of your content. This is the search engine's way of making sure you're citing your information and are helpful to the people it sends to your site by referencing relevant information for them. Internal links are the other important type of link this tool can look at and is generally important at letting search engines know how big your site is and where all the different parts of it are located.
By having an ample number of these two types of links you can help your website perform better when it comes to search engine results. Using this tool is the first step towards knowing whether your site has enough links or not.