Now that you’ve done the lion’s share of the hard work, you can ‘sit back’ and observe the
results of your handiwork. It’s very important that you monitor your progress. Keep an eye on
how many links you’re generating, where they’re coming from, and the overall impact on your
ranking.

Monitor how many links you’re generating
It’s important to monitor how many links you’re generating because you can cross-reference
that information against improvements in ranking to estimate how much effort your SEO push
is going to take. e.g. If you generate 300 links and your site goes from number 150 to number
15, you know that you should be topping the rankings before too long. If, on the other hand,
your ranking has only marginally increased, you know you need to work a lot harder.

You can monitor how many links you’re generating in a number of ways:

•    Search Google for “www.yourdomainname.com”. Google will then display a screen
which says, “Google can show you the following information for this URL:” At the
bottom of the list of option is “Find web pages that contain the term
"www.yourdomainname.com"". Click on this option. Google will display all the pages it
can find that have “www.yourdomainname.com” on one of their pages. Normally this
indicates a link to your site. (TIP: Bookmark the search results page so you can
perform this search quickly and easily as you will probably find yourself doing it quite
often.)

•    Go to http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ and type in your domain name. This
tool itemizes your links by search engine (i.e. tells you how many links each search engine has found) and also provides graphical trends.

•    Go to http://www.alexa.com and type in your domain name, then click ‘Sites Linking
in’ from the left of the page. (TIP: Alexa can also be used to track your ranking
metrics.)
TIP: You’ll notice that each of these tools return different figures. Don’t worry about
this. Just pick a tool and stick with it - this way you’re always comparing apples with
apples.

Monitor who’s linking to your site
Always keep track of who’s linking to your site. Apart from simply being interesting, it will give
you some idea of who is interested in your site and your material, you can assess their
importance (PR), and also more accurately target their needs with future link generation
tactics.

Probably the easiest way to track who’s linking to your site is to set up a Google Monitor at
http://www.google.com/alerts. Google alerts notify you when your URL has been published on a web page. Google doesn't pick them all up, but it picks up a lot.
TIP: Whenever you receive an alert, you can visit the page to make sure the article in unchanged and the link back to your site is functioning.

Monitor your ranking
Obviously you should be monitoring your ranking to ensure that your hard work is not wasted (and to adapt your SEO and link generation strategy as needed).

Manually
You can check your ranking manually simply by doing a search for your keyword at the appropriate search engine.

TIP: If you prefer to check manually, make sure you bookmark the search results
page as you’ll probably find yourself performing this search fairly frequently. Don’t
perform it too frequently, though, as this can impact the perceived desirability of your
keywords (and it is argued that Google takes exception to repeated searches of this
type).

Automatically
You can check all the major search engines (AOL, Google, HotBot, MSN, Netscape, Yahoo/Fast/AltaVista) at once using MarketLeap’s verification tool
http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm. NOTE: This tool returns a page number (e.g. it will tell you your site appears on page 2 of Yahoo).
There are plenty of other tools out there that you can use to monitor your ranking, such as
CleverStat’s Free Monitor for Google (see http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-
query.htm). Shop around until you find the tool that suits you best. The important thing to remember is that you don’t have to pay anything for a rank monitoring tool as there are plenty of free ones on offer.