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One thing most webmasters do is concentrate on building new links.
Once the link has been obtained they move on to new sites in order
to get more links.
Webmasters take the existing links for granted...
Sometimes it can really pay to analyze the existing links that a
site already has. Some of the sites may have improved in popularity
and PR, and you might not be making the most of links that are on
those sites.
A few day ago we analysed the links to one of our sites, which is
a guitar tuition site that has PR4 and about 600 uniques a day. We
recently added a lot of content to this site called guitar tabs.
In case you're not familiar what guitar tabs are, they are basically
sheet-music for the guitar that is widely available on the internet.
After analysing the links we realised that one of the sites that
links to it is a popular guitar tablature software site with PR6
and an Alexa ranking of 38,880.
The links page on the PR6 site has the following layout:
We noticed that our link was placed in "Other Resources", which
is obviously the least visible link on the links page. If you actually
click on that link it becomes apparent that the "other resources"
page is in fact full of links. We noted that out of the 38 links
our site was placed 32.
Needless to say it's very hard to gain traffic when your site is
listed in a category that is hardly visible to visitors and has a
lot of other site listings in it.
As our site hosts guitar tabs used by the program that the site
in question sells, we e-mailed the support right away to ask if our
site could be listed in the "Tablatures Links" category. After
a few e-mails they agreed to change the anchor text of the link
to one that has more SEO value, and placed us 6th out of the 14
listings in the new category.
So what were the results that we saw?
We're not actually sure about the results of the change in terms
of SEO - as the change was made very recently and it obviously takes
some time for any changes to take effect. However the result in terms
of traffic and impressions was noticed straight away.
Our site experienced a 60% increase in traffic and a 150% increase
in AdSense earnings, which can be seen in the graph below:
This graph shows the Google AdSense earnings since the guitar site
started. Please note that the area that is abnormally high during
the early stages is where we advertised it using PPC.
Just a quick glance at the graph will make it obvious the huge difference
link analyzing can make. The leap near the end of the graph is the result
of changing that single link mentioned above.
Analysing existing links to your sites is simply a concept that may
have been overlooked by a large majority of webmasters, so we hope that
you found this article useful and that you can make some use of what
we have said.
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