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.