By now, most people with any knowledge of SEO know that the number of links to a website can greatly increase its page rank. Google treats links almost like an encyclopedia treats citations. That is why it’s not only important that you have a lot of links, but also that those links are coming from as many different domains as possible.

A great tool for checking your link diversity is Open Site Explorer by SEO Moz. Open Site Explorer will give you some important link data about your website, including the number of total links, and the total number of linking root domains. In order to find out if you’re using your links effectively, divide the number of total links, by the linking root domains. This will give you your “Link Diversity Ratio”. Link diversity ratio is an equation that we use in our SEO evaluations. In order to receive a passing grade from us you would want to stay below a ratio of 25.0.

You should also look into what those domains are, as more authoritative domains make for better links. For this, you can use Majestic SEO. Majestic SEO will provide you with some of the more authoritative domains that are linking to your site.

A large part analyzing your links is the anchor text. Anchor text is just the text that is displayed for one of your links. So for our website the most used anchor text is “digital firefly marketing”. Majestic SEO breaks your most used anchor texts down into a pie graph, so you can easily tell what your anchor texts are. One of Google’s numerous penalties takes anchor text into account. According to Google, any website with excessive use of an anchor text is over optimizing. We will usually try to stay under 60% for any given anchor text.

There are plenty of other ways to find more information about your links. Feel free to let us know what tools you use in the comments section below.