Tracking Your Incoming Links

The importance of incoming links has been talked up here. Now, I want to tell you about the technique and importance of tracking those incoming links.

What good does it do if someone clicks a link to your site but don't know where exactly that click came from? I mean, hey-great you see the visits in your stats, but it doesn't really tell you where it came from. Even if it does tell the 'Referring Site', there's no way to know if that was a link someone else put up as a reference to your site or a link you gave them.

Incoming links need to be tracked, whether their paid links or not. There is code you can have your webmaster add to incoming links to tell you if the link was text or image, what site and even what page it came from, the medium: email or webpage or paid ad.

You can then name these different campaigns and track the effectiveness in your web analytics. It will tell you which links are being clicked from which sites and allow you to tweak your link campaigns so they generate more traffic.

Each incoming link campaign should be set up a little differently, though, so ask your webmaster for help, unless you're familiar with web analytics.