Our team spends a lot of time on the net looking for easy to use and self-explanatory tools for our readers. If you are working on search engine optimization, one of those FREE tools is LinkVendor.

LinkVendor offers a very robust series of different metrics about a site.

It checks for Wikipedia entires, DMOZ (large open web directory), Alexa, Google PageRank, Keyword Position, etc, etc, etc. It has roughly twenty tools presented on a nice clean page, which product fairly understandable results that you can take action on.

These tools are not just for your site. When you are expanding your online promotional efforts- keep a list of five to ten competitive or like-minded sites. Compare the numbers and information on those sites that can help you identify where relevant traffic and prospects are. You will usually find that competitors have spent thousands of dollars gathering competitive intelligence about your marketplace and that information is freely available on the web. When you become rich and successful with your own project, you can send them a thank you note for providing all that wonderful information.

Backlink services were probably one of the fastest growing methods for promoting a web site quickly a year ago. They used underhanded, but not forbidden, methodologies for instantly driving traffic to a new web site without actually doing any work or going through the tried and true search engine optimization practices that are search engine approved.

Essentially a backlink service used one of the strongest attributes the search engines used to determine a sites actual value. The problem is that there were so many of these link farms that search engines like Google got tired of it and decided that they would eliminate this dubious method that was so often abused.

About six months ago, Google edited their codex that determines a sites strength so that a site believed to be using a backlink service would be punished instead of benefited for the use of such a service. This doesn’t seem to have deterred the companies selling these services as they continue to advertise their methods and spam site owners with offers of strong links and support from a network of site owners just like you!

While back linking is a valuable way to gain traffic, it is always best to be careful about how you get those links. Bear in mind that any trick used to subvert the search engines will be discovered and eliminated sooner or later. The easiest and most cost effective manner to gain traffic and ranking for your site is to follow the rules that the search engines use to determine your site strength and relevancy. That way when they eliminate the next big trick or scam, your site will still be on top where it should be.

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