If you have a website, whatever its purpose, you want it to be seen.  Whether it’s a blog you write for fun, an affiliate marketing site you use to make money, or a commercial site for your business, it’s not doing you any good if nobody knows about it.  In the bad old days, people used to remember site URLs and your domain name really mattered, but in the Google age, people generally access the sites they visit not by typing in a memorized URL and navigating to it, but by running a search or clicking a link they find on a page they’re already using.  This is why search engine optimization is more important now than ever before.

Knowledge is Power – and Analysis is Crucial

In order to optimize your site for the major search engines, you first need to know what kind of position you are currently in.  The site stats you get from tools like Google analytics only tell part of the story.  Sure, you can see how many visitors you’ve had, and where they are regionally, but when it comes to analysing how many potential visitors you might get in future, you really need to analyse how well your site performs on the search engines.

Link Popularity – What Does It Mean?

One important factor when it comes to bringing visitors in to view your site, is how many links to it are generated by the main search engines.  While Google is the most important because of its huge market share, it is also worth analysing for Yahoo! if you can, a lot of people still use its other features like mail and news, and while they’re there, they can be using it to find links to your site too.  Backlinks are a critical part of SEO, and getting an indication of how popular your site is in these terms can help you assess how well your site is performing, and make any necessary tweaks to your approach.

How to Test Your Domain’s Link Popularity for Free

Generally, you will want to know the link popularity for your entire domain rather than any given page on your site, because this gives a fairer indication of how well you are doing.  One individual blog post you have up on there may not be faring that well, but if your site itself is bringing in the eyeballs then you can rest assured that your overall SEO strategy is sound.

To find out the link popularity of your domain, use Pingler’s free, easy to use link popularity checker.  All you have to do is enter the address of any domain you want to check, and click continue to run the analysis.  To make sense of the results, why not compare yours to sites you know are doing well, and see how you measure up.  Used in conjunction with some of our other helpful SEO analysis tools, the link popularity checker can give you a great insight into how your site performs on the web.