‘Link Bait’ is any content that encourages other site owners to link to a site, and the Text Link Ads Blog juice Calculator is a great example.

It is another tool that allows bloggers to assess and rank the ‘value’ of their blog.

Similiar to SEOMoz page strength and Google PageRank, it uses the number of Bloglines subscribers, Alexa rank, Technorati ranking and Technorati inbound links to give a blog a score out of ten. Blog owners can then display their rank on their site with a badge - which links back to Text Link Ads.

Tools like this are a great way to get traffic and links to a site, bloggers are always interested in knowing how popular their blog is.

The best bit about this tool is that it almost automatically qualifies the links back to Text Link Ads. Those who are likely to add the badge to their site are those who have a high score - great sites to get a link back from!

(See the definition of link bait in the SEO glossary)

Best of The Web directory is offering a 20% discount on it’s review fees this month (June).

Even minus the 20%, the $200 one-off review fee (non-refundable) is pretty steep, but it will give you a high quality link to your site. Just make sure your site is a quality one or you may lose your hard earned cash for nothing!

The promotional code for the discount is: BEACHBUM

Link: http://botw.org

Source: http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread16070.html and http://seo-sydney.blogspot.com/2007/06/discount-on-paid-directory-submission.html

This is another handy shortcut bookmarklet for accessing Microsoft Live Search backlink information for a page.

Click and drag the following link to your toolbar or right click and add to your bookmarks or favourites: MS Live External Links

Click on the bookmark to quickly see the pages linking to the one you are viewing according to MS Live search. The bookmark uses the site: command to take away internal links, so only external links are listed.

There are quite a few tools out there for finding out how many backlinks you have and where they come from, but it is better to hear it from the horses mouth - we want to know what how many links Google thinks are pointing at our site.

Well, Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you see that. Once you have verified that you own a site (by uploading an html file to your server or including a special meta tag in your index page) you can view how many links to your site Google has indexed. (You also need a Google account)

The results are very interesting and a lot more useful than the inaccurate Link: operator available in Google search.

As well as showing the total number of external links to your site, the tool breaks them down to show which pages within your site they are pointing at, where they are coming from and the date they were last found. (Using this I’ve found a few directories that provide multiple links from one submission because of search results pages that are indexed).

You can also view a similar display for the internal link structure of your site. The number of internal links to a page helps Google rate the relative importance of pages within a site. Seeing it displayed this way helps to highlight problems in your internal link structure.

All this data can be downloaded. You could combine it with other data such as the pagerank of your site’s pages and the pages linking to them for a more thorough analysis.

You can also upload and check sitemaps, check your robots.txt file, view search queries for your site and other stuff I haven’t fully understood yet.

This tool is a must for anyone wanting to understand how Google crawls and interprets your site.

Find out more about it at: http://searchengineland.com/070205-165836.php