Do You Know How Google Monitors Incoming Backlinks?

Many people put a tremendous amount of effort into their blog or website and then lament the fact they get no traffic and their sites never show up in Google searches. Sadly, having a great page with lots of original and informative content is only half the battle in getting visitors. The website or blog also has to be search engine optimized, or SEO friendly to pull search engine traffic - only then will a site increase in popularity and build up a dedicated following. The following is a list of 5 essential SEO tools that should be used by any webmaster looking to increase their Google page rankings. Most of the tools discussed below can be found through the Google's free site monitor tools that include Google search monitor, Google web-monitor and various easy to use monitors that have been implemented in the Google Gadgets software.

1. Link Popularity is Essential
To a search engine like Google, the authority and worthiness of any website is determined by the amount of links pointing to the site. A general rule of thumb is that the more backlinks a site has, the more attractive it is to a search engine. It is vital for the webmaster to monitor the link popularity of their site - i.e. the amount of backlinks their site possesses. There are many link popularity SEO tools that make it easy to monitor the number of backlinks a site has.

2. It is Important to Verify Backlinks
Backlinks are incoming links to a site and are vital in building an SEO optimized site. However, it is not enough to simply have a large amount of backlinks, the quality of the links are also important. Backlinks are usually a mix of deep links and homepage links. Homepage links, as the name suggests, links to the home page of a website while deep links point to specific pages within a site. Search engine algorithms generally give more weight to deep links than homepage links. A backlink checker SEO tool is important to check the quality and effectiveness of a site's links.

3. Check the Site's Page-rank with a Page-rank Checker
Page-rank is a method by which the search engine ranks a site based on a variety of criteria - the main being the number of high quality backlinks a site possesses. A website with a high page-rank is the holy grail of SEO optimization, and there are many methods webmasters use to get a higher page-rank, including the use of redirect links. A page-rank checker is an invaluable SEO tool that helps determine the real page rank of a site to aid the webmaster in coming up with an optimization strategy.

4. Predict a Site's Page-rank
There are SEO tools that attempt to predict a site's Google page-rank - these are just estimates as no tool can accurately replicate the search algorithms used by Google to calculate the page-rank. Nevertheless it can be a fun way to predict a site's Google rank and even provide the webmaster with some motivation to improve a site's rankings.

5. Evaluate the Site's Search Engine Position
After performing a number of search engine optimization techniques, every webmaster needs to know what their site's search engine position is in regards to certain target keywords. This can be manually done by typing the keywords into Google and nothing the site's position in the search engine results or it can be automatically done with a search engine position SEO tool.

Anyone serious about performing search engine optimization on their websites should use these five essential tools. These tools can be found online for free through services such as Google's Webmaster Tools which provides a wealth of site monitors, Google search monitors and more.