Check Your Google Backlinks with the Webmaster Tool

When you host your website on Google, you get free access to a lot of great Google tools. Many of these will help you keep track of you website, increase your SEO potential, and make your website even better. If you aren’t using these tools, then you aren’t getting the most out of your Google website. The most important tool you should be aware of is the Webmaster tool. Not only does it allow you to control your site, but it allows you to see what people are coming in to your site, how they are doing it, and check your Google backlinks. In other words, it can provide you with valuable information regarding your backlinks. These are important for any website’s search engine optimization campaign.

Content Keywords

The first thing you should check in the webmaster tool is how many keywords you have within your content. You need to have keywords written in to high quality content in order to attract traffic to your site. The right keyword density will also give you a higher ranking in Google’s search engine results. Since that’s what drives up to 60% of traffic, you will definitely want to be concerned with this keyword number. On the Webmaster dashboard, you will see a link menu on the left of your screen. There, you can click on Optimization and a submenu will appear. Click the Content Keywords link and it will take you to a page with more details. You will be able to find out which keywords you’ve used, where they are in your site, and at what keyword density they have been worked in. Your goal is to stay between 3 and 6% keyword density, so if you aren’t hitting that number, be sure to revise as necessary.

Search Queries

You will also get the chance to check the webmaster tool for search queries. From the dashboard, simply click on the traffic link in the side menu and then click search queries. This page will tell you how many times people searched for your page and how many times they clicked to enter it. These are the most basic backlinks that show up in Google’s search results. You can sort these queries by date, by query, or by page. You’ll be able to see which pages were entered each day and which pages are getting the most traffic. This really gives you an idea of what people seem to consider the most important on your site. That kind of information can help you make changes to the rest of the site, to work more similarly to those people are using frequently.

 

Links to Your Site

When it comes to backlinks, you want to make sure you have a lot of them, especially those coming from Google since that is where 60% of people search. On your Google Webmaster dashboard, click on traffic in the side menu and then click Links to Your Site. Once there, you will see a page that lets you know how many links are directing people to your site. You will even have information on where these links are and how many people are using them. You may find that one link is doing much better than another. If this is the case, you might want to place links on similar sites. Don’t remove the links that aren’t doing as well though. Any link getting any of amount of clicks is a good link, because Google uses the number of backlinks to your site as a way to judge its popularity. Of course, if those links are on bad sites or sites with little traffic, then it would be wise to remove them, because Google also penalizes sites that are associated with unethical companies.

Internal Links

Links pointing to your site aren’t the only important ones though. You should also have a good amount of internal links. If you have a lot of outgoing links connected to big, high traffic sites, that is yet another way to show Google’s search engine how important you are. It will also look for how many links you have pointing to other pages within your site. From the dashboard, click the traffic menu and then click internal links. There you will find a list of your internal links along with how frequently they are being used. If you find that some are getting more use than others, you might want to shift the position they are in, make them more noticeable, or make the pages they are pointing to more important. Pages in your site that aren’t getting used really aren’t helping your search engine ranking, so revise them to attract more traffic.

+1 Reports

If you do a lot of business through your Google site, you might want to get involved in Google +1. This program allows users to +1 articles, products, posts, etc. that you put on your site when they like it. The more+1s you have on a particular article, the more entertaining and useful other viewers will believe it to be and will be more likely to take a look. Google obviously likes to see a lot of +1s on your sites too, because it shows that people have been viewing your content and marking it as useful information, not just keyword fluff. Your content is then listed as recommended on Google, which leads to more Google backlinks and more traffic for your website.