I am in the process of figuring out if thinkBIGsites.com organic search engine optimization program is worth $2K or $3K a month.

Maybe you are too.

I figure the best way to do this is to evaluate the work they did for one of their reference clients, Frank Key, who sells a colloidal silver product.  (This is good because it’s the same industry as my company, Jigsaw Health, working to optimize for magnesium supplements.)

(Images from The Secret To Internet Marketing That Actually Works pdf download.)

So…How Do You Check Inbound Links?

Links to your website with your keywords in the “anchor text” is what Google ranking is mostly based on.  Everyone gets that, right?  Ok good.

I needed to figure out how to check Frank’s inbound links.  Here’s what I did:

Step 1) Googled “How to check inbound links”

Step 2) Got totally lost for like 2 hours.

Thus, Step 2 will be the subject of a future post called “How Do you Check Inbound Links?” because this was not nearly as easy as I wanted it to be would have imagined.

I couldn’t find a single service that reported inbound links grouped by unique domain.  They all just showed every page that linked to the target domain.

They were showing me millions of pine needles.  I wanted to see the trees.

Of the tools I tested out, Backlinkwatch seemed the best. (Found from this list of 10 Backlink Checking Tools.)  It found 1133 links.  Wow…sounds awesome!

Of course, what is confusing is that Yahoo!’s site explorer tool only showed 15 inbound links, and Google shows “about 29.”  WTF?  Don’t you just love data discrepancy?!?! Grrr…

Next Step: Reference Check

The sales rep at ThinkBIGsites I talked with this afternoon is going to let me talk to some reference clients.  I’ll share what I learn from them in a future post or an update to this post.  More to come…

What’s A Boy To Do?

Get high with a little help from my friends.  (Pun intended…like Gaylord Focker, I pass on grass. Always.)

Chase Granberry — of Authority Labs website tracker fame — recommended I check out SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and SlingshotSEO.  I’ll take a look and report back.

Any other comments, please post them.  “I want to get high, so-o-o-o-o high.” 

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