The Wordtracker Academy

Whether you’re running the simplest blog or an enormous international ecommerce site, you should be measuring how visitors interact with your website.

There are lots of analytics packages you can use. The most common - perhaps because it's free - is Google Analytics If you're new to analytics, this article will get you kick started. We'll help you install the software on your site. We’ll recommend some important business metrics you should be tracking. And we'll help you set up a keyword dashboard so you can track your traffic.

It's important that you understand what the links going back to your site look like. We call this your backlink profile, and it helps you decide what kind of links to go after, where to get them from and what anchor text to use. This article is a step by step guide to using the Link Builder tool to find this information, and make the informed decisions your business needs.

The Link Builder tool finds you sites to get links from. And with Custom Strategies in Link Builder, you can find relevant, quality sites that your competitors can't, in 6 easy steps.

Successful search engine optimization (SEO) requires inbound links from quality relevant websites. Using extracts from their book "The Definitive Guide to Link Building (2013 edition)", Ken McGaffin and Mark Nunney here outline the definitive steps in a successful, long term link building campaign ...

Link Builder allows you to quickly and easily find vast numbers of potential sites to link to you. With this guide you will learn to use powerful features to find, segment and generate contact details for potential sites. This article is an ideal first step into the world of Link Builder.

Search engines rely on links to tell them which sites are worth ranking and which are not. Simply put, the more links you have from a wide variety of quality sites, the higher your site will rank in Google's results.

Knowing this, it's easy to get carried away, building lots of links while forgetting that quality is much more important than quantity.

We’ve spent the past few months updating and changing Link Builder, so that it’s now easier to find and build quality links. In this post, we’re going to take you through the new features, and how they’ll help your link building.

At Wordtracker, we live or die by what our customers (you guys) think. That sounds a bit cliché and hack, but it’s also true. We’re a small company and we need to give you what you want and fast. You’ve been asking for better and quicker ways to find sites that might link to yours. So that’s what we’ve done. But why make changes if we don’t talk about them? This is a quick look at how you find the best sites you can blog for. We call this feature ‘Guest Post’ and here’s how it works in the recently updated Link Builder, our link building tool.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool is everything you need to make your link building as quick and efficient as possible. And it’s just got even better. In this article in a series of three highlighting how link building just got easier, I’ll be taking a look at ‘mentions’, what they are and how they can help you get some easy links.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool has had an upgrade of late – making it much much easier to find link prospects - the sites that might link back to you. In our third of three articles highlighting the new features of Link Builder, I’ll be looking at how you can easily collect more detailed information on your prospects and then sell your site more effectively. In short, our new feature called ‘tags’ makes getting links easier. Here’s how.

Targeting news media should be part of everyone’s link building campaigns. You can do this on your own, or use Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool as the perfect starting point.

No matter what industry you’re in there will be bloggers that write about it. They’ll usually have a well-established audience and a good presence on search engines.

There’s a lot of link building opportunity in the big name social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so on. But there’s also a lot of link building opportunities on less well known niche social media sites.

Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool helps you easily find such sites and keeps them all in one place.

Ken McGaffin in the third article in his Link Building Made Simple series describes how to survey the current situation in your particular market, by building campaigns in Link Builder

It is of course important to measure the success of your link building campaigns. In this second in a series of six articles in the Link Building Made Simple series, Ken McGaffin shows how you can measure not only your return on investment but also what works and what doesn’t work for your website in your particular market.

Ken McGaffin, in the first of his Link Building Made Simple series of articles, explains how to form a simple strategy that will get your link building campaigns off to a great start.

Links bring your business multiple benefits that will repay your investment many times over and Ken McGaffin has written series of articles on how to build links the best way, very simply. Read his introduction to these articles, and links to the rest in series are at the bottom page.

Creating great content gives you tremendous ammunition for attracting links.

But content without active promotion is likely to turn into a very damp squib. So you must have mechanisms in place that will allow you to easily and repeatably get your message out to as many relevant people as possible.

Planning your content is crucial but it is not just something that you can churn out: it requires time, thought and effort. This fifth in the Link Building Made Simple series presents some ideas on how to produce lots of good content.

Link building has changed dramatically over the last dozen or so years that Ken McGaffin has been in the business. In this article he advises how the linking landscape has changed and how to target new prospects.

When you're link building, you want to find high quality link prospects.
Yet, you also want to find prospects where there's a good chance of actually getting a link.
Ken McGaffin shows how such prospects can be found in the 'magic middle' ...

Link Builder provides details of link prospects already sorted into strategy groups such as blogs, news media and trusted sites. Ken McGaffin explains in Video 3 in the series Getting Started with Link Builder how to take advantage of this to sort out your prospects into effective link building campaigns.

Video 1 in Ken McGaffin's series Getting Started with Link Builder videos shows how to begin to build great link building campaigns using just one keyword.

Sites that link to more than one of your competitors are must-have links that should be easy to get. Ken McGaffin shows you to find them.

A good link building campaign needs to be planned, managed, monitored and reported on. It will use a wide range of strategies with many link prospects for each.

This is a lot of work and Wordtracker's Link Builder tool has been rebuilt to do all these jobs for you. Can all this really be in one tool? Ken McGaffin says it can and here he shows you how.

Professional SEOs will tell you that different types of sites require different approaches to link building. Tailor your link building - and you’ll increase your chances of getting a link.

In the Link Builder tool, we’ve already filtered your prospects and organized them into strategies so you can tailor your link building - and increase your chances of getting a link.

Here is a list of the articles we've featured, based on these strategies, that will help you on your way to create effective, traffic-attracting link building campaigns:

Link building is about building relationships. And the daftest thing you can do is stop once you've got a link. So pay attention to people who already link to you and see what else you can do together.

You need help and advice in carrying out your link building campaigns or on using the Wordtracker Link Builder tool? Read on to find advice on link building strategies, guides and tips and any other link building tidbits we can think of on this page.

Trusted sites are usually defined as non-profit websites (.org), educational bodies (.edu) and government agencies (.gov). Contrary to popular belief, Google doesn’t treat links from trusted sites any differently from other links. However, just because Google doesn’t treat them any differently, that doesn’t mean that they’re not different.

Shopping on the web is of course a major activity so the number of sites retailing goods and the number of sites writing, advising and commenting on products and the companies who produce them is huge.

Online directories offer a source of easy links and remain a good first step for many link building campaigns. Yet, many links from directories offer little value. Ken McGaffin outlines his approach to link building with directories.