Start a Side Business

As part of my ongoing SEO Experiment, one of the the key factor is the number of links to your site (it helps if they are relevant to your subject). The other corner stone of SEO is to optimize your site, and I’ll outline my thoughts in an upcoming post. This will cover the simple things anyone can do without outside help, and where you can rip 80% to 90% of a professional optimization for not even 20% of the effort.

So, a way to measure the number of links to your site (backlinks) the search engines know about, is to simply ask them:

On Google, use link:sidebusiness.biz

On MSN, use link:sidebusiness.biz

On Yahoo, use backlink:sidebusiness.biz

After a few weeks of being online, only MSN registers 10 links. The other don’t show anything yet.

For a new site, it takes 2-4 weeks for anything to start showing up from the time you initially register your site. Curiously enough though, Google Alerts will reports new links way before anything shows up in the “link:yourdomain.com” results.

4/18/06 update: You may want to try who links to me. They have results from yahoo, MSN, blogrolling.com and a few others.

Related Articles:

• More evidence that you should get the best search ranking you can get
• The importance of the title tag
• SEO Experiment