How to track link building? What metrics?

[RSGregC]

I'm an SEO newbie (my main roles are front-end designer and content manager). 
I've been managing our company's effort to generate links.

In the past, trying to develop relationships has gone nowhere. As a result, we're currently mostly creating good content ourselves and posting it on Web2.0 sites (weebly, etc.) and linking back to our site, and then using UAW (unique article wizard) to create a second tier of links to those links.

We've been doing this for a while, and our traffic from SEO is going up - but we don't really know how to track our work.

Can you please 
a) give your opinion about our approach, and
b) tell me which metrics we should be using, and which tools for these metrics?

Thank you so much
Greg

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Completely agree with David here - your approach to link building is quite a dangerous one that might see an initial bounce, but I wouldn't expect that to last.

I wrote an article on ethical link building that might be worth a read but you should know that Google have stated that they don't want to see poor links fromArticle Marketing, so I would cease with that immediately. Especially with the spun content. If I were in your shoes, anything that has been spun and republished, I would go back over and remove.

If yours is the sort of business that can carry off a blog / news section, I would write this great content and keep it all on your own site.

Setup Authorship from your site to your Google+ page (set one up if you don't have one) and then start posting links to articles in there. Then start building a network of others who will also be interested in sharing your content. You need to get your content out as much as possible, but this has to be handled the right way.

Hope this helps.

Andy

[David_ODonnell]

A. I'd recommend steering clear of UAW, it generates low quality spun content that is hosted on low quality (trash) sites.

The content strategy is legit, but you might want to look at moving towards publishing only unique content and working more on outreach to get published on authority sites in your niche.

B. You might want to track things like # of links on a regular basis from multiple sources (OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic, GWT). You might also track DA over time using OSE.

You'd also want to look at how the link building is affecting your organic search rankings and traffic.

[danatanseo]

Hi Greg,

Well the fact that you're here in Q&A is a huge step in the right direction. I've been an in-house SEO for over 5 years now, and I never used SEOMoz or Q&A until the last 6 months. There are tons of great tools, but, as you might expect, each has its own learning curve, so be patient with yourself (and the tools).

SEOMoz is amazing of course. Screaming Frog is downloadable software that makes it easy to sift through and sort large amounts of information about your pages. Ahrefs is awesome, but I've never tried the paid version so I'll let someone else weigh-in on that. I have heard great things about Majestic SEO, but again I haven't used the paid version yet...we are planning to go with a paid version with them in the next few months. SEMRush is a great tool to gain visibility to what competitors are advertising.

First and foremost, I'd begin by snuggling up with Google Webmaster Tools. It's free and it's a lot of information. I like the backlinks comparative tools in SEOMoz and Ahrefs better thanGWT because, as you well know, some links are super valuable and some are worthless. It's really good to know which are which. One amazing link can be worth thousands of low-value links.

I hope that's helpful for starters. Chances are you'll gravitate towards some tools and not so much to others depending on your site and what your needs are. Good luck!