Have You Tested Your Links?

Trying to get good ranking in search engines is hard enough, but you have to maintain the effort. We are constantly told that links are the route to good rankings, as long as the links are relevant and maintained.

Your website is probably changing almost every day to keep up with your SEO efforts. You try this, tweek that, remove something or other and in the end, your initial tests on your website are no longer valid. The last thing you need now is irrelevant keywords and broken links.

With this in mind, I have been spending the past few weeks developing some online tools for you to quickly test your links (onpage and reciprocal) and keywords. These tests include;

1. Link Extractor: Evaluates the links (internal and external) on your web page, including the attributes (href, onclick, rel and target), anchor text/HTML and status (i.e. are they still active).
2. Reciprocal Link Checker: You been told that a link to your website is on a certain page? Well, how good is that link? In other words;  
• can your link be followed? (nofollow)  
• does your link have any events attached to it? (onclick)  
• does the link reference your website directly or does it follow an internal path  
• is the reciprocal page full of links and no textual value?  
• is the reciprocal page linked to from the home page of the website?  
• does the page have a theme similar to your website (keywords)
3. Keyword Analyser: You have setup your webpage, written your content and then added your META keywords. This tool allows you to compare your keywords against the content of your web page.

All the tools are currently free, so use them and let me know what you think.

Regards,
Craig

PS: This website is still undergoing development so more tools will be added as time goes by. If you can think of any other relevant tests that you would like to have available, let me know and I will see if I can get them online.

Reciprocal Link Please?

On a daily basis, I get emails requesting a reciprical link from some or other website.

Generally, the content of this email starts something like, "Dear Webmaster, I'm the webmaster of http://.... We came accross your website, http://www.craigs-directory.com/ and feel that it would fit perfectly with our website..."

Generally, I reply with "Thanks for the link exchange offer. Please feel free to submit your website to my web directory at http://submit.craigs-directory.com/cd/submitLink.asp. After submission, you will be given a reciprocal link specific to your website which will allow it to earn credits for each click..."

Nine times out of ten I get a response similar to; "We do not want our link in a web directory"?

I have a few questions,

1. The name of my website is "Craigs Directory", implying that my name... (wait for it)... is Craig and not webmaster - this leads me to believe that the message was generated by a service
2. The second part of my websites name is "Directory", there is a clue there as to what it is.
3. What's wrong with web directories? Google has one (http://www.google.com/dirhp) and so does Yahoo (http://dir.yahoo.com/) so there must be some value in viewing websites by category?

If you are going to be trying to email webmasters for link a link exchange, at least have a look at the website you want a reciprocal link from - you might learn something.

Regards,
Craig