Anyone who has used link exchanges as a means to get backlinks has certainly had the doubt, “I wonder if they’ll keep my link up on their site…”   And anyone who has actually spent (read: wasted) the time going back to those sites periodically to check on those links has likely found that that doubt became a reality and that some of their links are no longer there.  And while I’m sure that most of you are far too busy to actually verify that your links are still live, you can’t help but be a little frustrated by the fact that they could always drop their end of the deal anytime by taking off your link.

This frustration was one of the reasons I started Backlink Reporter.  I wanted a tool that could quickly check all of my backlinks and tell me if they were still live or not.  I couldn’t find such a tool, so I created one.

Now with the click of a button I get a complete report of all the backlinks I’ve chosen to track.  The first item in the report?  Whether or not the link is still live.  If it’s no longer showing up, I can simply click on the contact email for that website owner and email them asking why it’s been removed.

The tool doesn’t just verify the status of the links, however.  It’s also a great tool to track your anchor texts, date added, PR, price paid, and more.  It’s become an integral part of my link building as I can now quickly see the keywords that I’ve focused on and where I need focus next.

To learn more about Backlink Reporter, simply click on the link at the top-right of this page or go to www.backlinkreporter.com/.  It’s a free service that’s sure to help you better manage your link building efforts.

Ok, so it’s not much of a “debate”, but there is certainly a lot of conflicting information our there about how to best use a robots.txt file for SEO.  Some recommend creating a rather comprehensive file, while others say to keep it short and simple.  And still others claim it’s not necessary to have one at all. I personally side with the two latter options, but that’s just me.

A robots.txt file’s main purpose is to simply tell the crawlers from the search engines (and other bots as well) which content they should skip when crawling your site.  Most people’s first reaction to this is something along the lines of “well I want all of my pages crawled, right?”  And in most cases (especially for small sites), they’re probably correct.

One argument for using your robots.txt file to disallow certain content from being crawled is to avoid any duplicate content that you may have floating around in your site.  This duplicate content can come from having a print version or, if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, if you have a post under multiple categories.  In some of these instances, you may want to use your robots.txt file to filter some of the them out.  As a personal opinion, however, this can sometimes (accidentally) do more harm than good.

So for those that are just getting started in SEO or are working on promoting their new (and possibly first) website, I’d recommend using a very basic robots.txt file that simply allows full access to your site.  If that’s your wish, open your favorite text editor and enter the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Save it as “robots.txt” and upload it into the root directory of your site (yoursite.com/robots.txt).  This tells all the bots crawling your site not to skip any of your content.

I’m sure there are plenty of others that would argue both for and against this method, but for the beginner, it’s better to play it safe until you have a little better handle on how everything works.

If you’re at all engaged in promoting your website, building links, or building business relationships through forums, blogs, link exchanges, carnivals, etc., then you know how much time you can spend doing those things.  Often, much of that time is spent trying to find good places or opportunities to request links, start a conversation, or promote your product or website.  Well how would you like to received a constant stream of these opportunities right in your inbox?  The tool has been around for quite a while now, but I suspect many haven’t been using it for these purposes.  That tool is Google’s Alerts, and it can drastically cut down the time you spend looking for related websites and content that can prove to be a resource in your website promoting journey.

What is Google Alerts?

For those that aren’t aware, Google Alerts is a tool provided by Google that automatically sends you links to content on the internet that contains certain keywords or parameters that you define.  For example, if you have a website about hair care products and you’re interested in getting alerts about web content related to the latest and greatest hair dryer (the DryFast2000), you can set up an alert that notifies you anytime the term “dryfast2000″ is newly posted on the internet.  You can choose to get these alerts instantly, once a day, or once a week.  Among other things you can also choose the type of web content that you want to receive alerts about (web, blogs, video, comprehensive, and more).

If you have a Google account, it’s extremely simple to set up your Alerts.  If you don’t have a Google Account, it just take a few quick seconds to set one up for you.

How to Use Google Alerts

At this point, it may be an obvious point that receiving dozens of notifications each day about highly targeted and related websites can be extremely helpful in finding opportunities to promote your website (either through link building or simply spreading the word about your product, service, or website).  It’s a simple thing, but one that can save you loads of time.  In addition, it may even help you stay abreast of the latest developing information in your niche or industry.

For most of us starting out in SEO, working on our new website, we tend to go about link building in the same ways.  We start submitting to directories, we might leave some blog comments around the blogosphere, we begin finding opportunities for link exchanges or one way links from reputable blogs, some may even pay for a link or two – the list goes on and on.  Unfortunately, in the early stages of our SEO efforts, we also tend to manage those link building efforts in the same way: poorly.

With all of the different sources of links and strategies to go about getting them, most people just start marching down their link building path without much direction or focus.  It is, afterall, difficult to keep track of everywhere you’ve gotten a link from.  And each individual link may not make much of a difference, so why keep track of it all anyway, right?  Wrong.

Before long, months have gone by and you know that you’ve put forth a good amount of effort to build links, but you really couldn’t tell me how “well” you’ve done.  You couldn’t for example, tell me if most of your link juice is coming from article submissions or one way links.  Or what the ratio is for the various anchor texts (keywords) that you’ve used.  And good luck remembering where many of those links were even located at.  And the end of the month or quarter, it’s difficult to know what changes need to be made, where you’ve done a good job, or where, for example, you need to go to improve/further your link building efforts.

For these reasons it’s important that you at least do some basic tracking of your backlinks.  Rather than blindly building links for your website pick a few metrics that will help you in your future link building decisions.  For example, you might track the anchor text (to know what future keywords to use), the PR of the linking webpage (to have a general idea of the quality of the links), or the URL ( to check back for future linking opportunities or to verify that the link is still there).

Now, am I saying that you should track every single one of your incoming links, including every blog comment or forum post?  No.  Not all links will carry a ton of value, and for those links, you may want to simply note down about how many links you think you received and from where.  Having this information together with some specifics on your higher quality links can prove to be a valuable tool down the road when you’re making decisions concerning your link building campaign.

Would you like to have access to an infinite number of “free” backlinks?  What if I told you that you already do?  It’s been around for a long time now, but you’re probably not taking advantage of it.  What is it?  Article submissions.

Now, the true value of links from article submissions can certainly be debated.  They’re not the kind of high quality links that (alone) will get you to the top ranks of Google.  But the fact still remains, that they are links, and are definitely good for SEO in some/many instances.  If, for example, your website is brand new and you’re looking to get some quick and free links in order to get your site indexed, article submissions are a great way to start.

So just how “free” are links from articles directories?  Well in terms of actual money, they are completely free.  In terms of time and effort, however, they are not free at all.  You’ll usualy find that writing quality articles for article directories can actually take a good deal of time.  Whether or not that time is worth it is a decision that you’ll have to make on your own.  Of course, if you’re willing to trade time for money, you can always pay someone to write your articles for you.

While the link juice that these articles bring to your site may not be best, the traffic that they can bring sometimes can be.  In your article marketing efforts, make sure that  you write very high quality content that people will get value from when they read it.  If they like it, chances are they’ll actually click on your link and visit your site.  After all, isn’t this the whole goal of SEO?  To bring more visitors to your website?

As I see it, article marketing can be effective for these two reasons: 1.  They do count as backlinks to your site and do cary some link juice for your SEO purposes, and 2. They can provide another opportunity for real people to find your information and, in turn, find your website.