I can't see my blog's back links on Alexa or Google Webmasters, why?

[Jack]

Hey Sandra,

Open Site Explorer and Back link Watch are pretty good resources to find your back links. There is also Ahrefs.com or you can just Google your site name like this:

a href= http://yoursite.com

That would be HTML code for your links, and if it comes up in Google's search results, then your link is indexed, and Google knows it is there. That will give you a much more accurate look at how many back links you have pointing to your site. Google does tend to hide these things to keep people from manipulating the search results.

Another aspect of your situation I would be careful about is linking in too many forums. Google has started to frown on that because so many people abuse that sort of link.

You need to be smart about your linking or it will be counter productive. You have to vary the domains that you link to, the IP addresses, and you have to have variety in your anchor text as well. You are doing great by writing good quality content. Keep that up!!! It will pay off. But you need to have a few things in order before you write.

It all starts with smart keyword research. Since you are probably trying to brand yourself through your blog, you are probably going for your site name or your name as a keyword. Unfortunately, there probably isn't that much search volume for that particular keyword. Or there may be. But you have to select your keywords based on a number of different factors.

One would be search volume for that keyword. If you are targeting a keyword that has no search volume, you won't get any visitors to your site. You also need to target keywords that you actually have a chance for ranking, meaning relatively low competition.

With that said, you can get this information from Google's Keyword tool, and a bit of research on the sites that are ranking on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to go for to see how well they are optimized.

Once you select keywords, you want to optimize your pages very well, but stay away from 'over SEO'. Keep your keyword density about 1-2% in your articles that you write. Make sure your keyword is in your title of your page. Have images on your page optimized for the keyword.

Then and only then should you start linking to your pages to get your blog out there. And when you do so, make sure you vary your links up well. Don't have all your links pointing to one or two keywords or URLs on your site.

Have a group of related keywords, both general and specific variations, of the main keyword you want to rank for.

This should get you on the right path. Do understand that SEO is easy once you get the hang of it. I know it seems daunting, but keep pushing on and you will get there. There is plenty of free training online, but don't go giving your email away for it. You'll get spammed to death by too many offers of the latest and greatest methods to promote your site.

I truly hope this helps. Good luck with your blog and your dancing.