Search Engine Optimization

Once I year, I have to prepare myself for the arduous process of running a full link audit on my site. Is it fun? Not by any stretch of the imagination, but it is very important nonetheless and helps shape my link building campaign for the coming year. Conducting a full link audit on all of my sites (including my company site and external blogs) is a very time consuming process, but it’s imperative that it gets done. The same is true for you and your websites.

Why should you bother with a full link audit?

First off, conducting a full link audit means that not only do I gather the data on how many links my sites have, but I also visit each and every one of those links and categorize them. You should visit all of the inbound links your site has because it is the only way you’ll be able to see just what kind of link it is. Is it a blog comment, article link, press release link or other purposeful link building tactic? Or is it a natural link, like someone quoting one of your blog posts or republishing a Facebook link. By visiting each link you’ll get a better idea of how well your link building campaign is progressing. If you’ve kept track of all the places you tried to get a link over the year, you’ll be able to see which ones went live and which ones did not.

Visiting each of the links in your link portfolio can also give you a good idea of where the holes are in your link building campaign and where there is room for growth. Do you rely too heavily on one type of link? This puts your website in a vulnerable position. For instance, a few years ago link exchanges were a viable form of link building until Google declared them black hat. Sites that were heavily involved in link building saw a majority of their link portfolios go up in smoke and their SEO suffered. I’ve said time and time again how important it is that you take a diversified approach to your link building, and visiting each of the links in your link portfolio really shows how well you have been doing with that.

Running a full link audit also means checking in on the competition. If you feel like you did everything right with your SEO in 2011 and just can’t beat the competition, it may be that they have a stronger link portfolio. Do they simply have more quality links than you? Are they being more aggressive with their link building campaign? How much are they augmenting traditional link building with social signals? All of these factors and more can be uncovered when you run a full link audit.

Depending on how long you have actively been link building, you might have a lot of links to get through. There is no rule saying it all needs to get done at once. If you would rather spread it out, try getting through a few hundred links each week and slowly chip away at the project.

Running a link audit on your top competitors can actually be very beneficial for your own SEO. First off, it gives you a good idea of how your own link portfolio measures up to the competition. It can also help you uncover valuable link building opportunities that you might have missed.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

For more SEO video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing SEO video lesson archive .

When you’re starting a link building campaign, it’s important to understand where you’re starting from. Even if you have never done any active link building, chances are you have a small link portfolio of natural links. An SEO link audit will help you determine your link building baseline and identify what kind of links you have and where they come from.

Watch this week’s SEO video tip here!

For more SEO video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing SEO video lesson archive .

While it’s not fun or glamorous, it is important that site owners conduct a full link audit once a year. Depending on how long you have been engaging in link building, you might have thousands of links to sort through, but it has to be done. Digging through you link portfolio is important for several reasons. First off, it helps you identify any holes in your link building strategy. Do you have hundreds of links from blog commenting but only three local search profiles? Secondly, organizing your link portfolio will alert you to any “bad links” that are pointing to your site. A few is common, but if you are seeing hundreds of links coming from cloaked text, pornography sites, link exchanges and so forth, you might be risking a search engine penalty.

When I run a link audit on my own company (or a client’s site) I break the links down into the following categories:

AL: Article Link
An article link could come from the author’s bio of an article that you published on a 3rd party site (say as a guest blogger) or it could be a link from the body of an article itself (say your company is cited as a reference).

BC: Blog Comment
Most blogs allow readers to leave a comment with name, e-mail and URL. Your name then becomes anchor text for the URL you want.

BNL: Blog/News Link
Was your company mentioned in a blog post on a 3rd party site (like a wedding gown boutique being credited on the wedding photographer’s blog post)? Did you company get a write-up in an online newspaper or get featured in an online video feed?

BP: Business Profile
Sites like MerchantCircle, Yelp, Google Places and so forth are great places to create a local business profile. Not only do you get the link, you area also increasing your online brand presence and making it easier for potential customers to find you.

DL: Directory Link
Believe it or not, directories still have value in today’s world of SEO. Well-established directories like DMOZ help build your trust factor with the search engines.

LE: Link Exchange
These can be both bad and good. I classify links where a company is listed as a sponsor or partner as a link exchange, and these are perfectly acceptable links. Links coming from random sites in exchange for a link to theirs is not.

NA: Not Appropriate
These are links coming from pornography sites, gambling sites, non-English sites and so forth. They actually devalue your site.

O: Other
Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the other categories.

PR: Press Release
Online press releases are a great place to include links because they can get picked up and redistributed by other sites. One press release with 3 or 4 links could actually end up creating several hundred incoming links.

SL: Social Link
These links come from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (the Big 3), as well as any smaller niche sites.

VM: Video Marketing
Video descriptions are a great place to incorporate a direct link to your site.

A link audit is the first step in developing any link building strategy. Before you can start doing any new link building, you need to have a clear picture of what has been done. Even if you have never engaged in any intentional link building before now, chances are you still have some amount of one-way links pointing to your site. These natural links develop over time as other sites link to your. A blog review of one of your products, for instance. Or an article quoting your VP of Marketing from an interview they gave to an online industry publication. These natural links just happen, regardless of whether you intended for them to occur or not.

A link audit is going to give you a baseline of where your site is in terms of link building. You need to know what kind of links are passing on their link juice to your site. A link audit is going to find almost every link that is pointing to your site—the good, the bad and the ugly ones.

Everyone should sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools account, if you haven’t already. This free tool allows you to see a list of internal and external webpages that link to your site. This is going to be one of the most accurate link audits you’ll find for your site. If you don’t use Google Webmaster tools, you can also use Link Diagnosis to run the link audit. Another free tool, Link Diagnosis is also a great way to run a link audit on the competition.

Once you have your set of links, you need to visit every single one that points to your site. Depending how much link building you’ve done, this could be hundreds or thousands of links. It’s time consuming and not at all glamorous, but it needs to be done at least once a year. You have to visit every link because you need to determine what kind of link it is. You also need to know if there are any unacceptable links pointing to your site that could end up hurting your SEO efforts (i.e. links from pornography or gambling sites).

If this is the first time you’ve run a link audit and you haven’t done any previous link building, don’t be surprised to see a lot of the same types of links—link exchanges from partner sites is probably the most common. However, if you have done link building before, you should be seeing a variety of many different sources of links including: blog comments, directory listings, business profiles, articles, news stories and blogs, press releases, video marketing, social media sites and more. Search engines like to see a diversified approach to link building and a link audit is going to help you see where you’ve been concentrating your efforts.