There are three elements to driving free search engine traffic to your website; great quality, frequently updated content and the number of good inbound links. You know whether your content is good and up-to-date, but how do you know how many people link to your site or more importantly who they are? It's not as hard as you may think. Use both Google and Yahoo to get a list of your inbound links.
  • Google – Go to Google and type link: followed by your domain name (no spaces) in to the search field e.g. ‘link:www.subhub.com’. You will instantly get a list of all the sites that link to your website. At the top of the results page you will see the total number of inbound links
  • Yahoo – Go to Yahoo and type link: followed by your domain name into the search field. You will see a list of all the sites that link to your Home Page. If you now type in linkdomain: followed by your domain name you will get a list of all the sites that link to all the pages across the whole of your site.
Make sure to run a link search on both sites, as the results will be different. Knowing who is linking to you is very valuable information. You should approach any very relevant websites to build a stronger relationship, so they will provide new links in future. You can also undertake these link searches on your competitors' domain names to find out who is linking to them. These no reason you shouldn't approach any sites you discover to request a link to your site. All is fair in love and war! More SEO Best Practices: