What is best way to evaluate external links to my site?

[leonenobleseate]

What is the best way to evaluate external links coming in to my site?  I have been working on trying to build links by commenting on blogs/forums and adding to directories, etc. I've run link reports through Open Site Explorer and Yahoo and they never seem to show the same links coming in. For example, i run link eport on Open Site Explorer and it will show links coming into my site that Yahoo doesn't show, and vice versa.

I guess I'm trying to figure best way to monitor each week new links coming into my site to determine if my efforts are fruitful.  Also, is there a certain period of time that should pass from time I put my link on another site (ie, a blog) until it will show up in OPen Site Explorer?

Thanks!  Oh, and I use the NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox to only comment on those sites that do follow.  Not sure if that's really effective or not.

[scanlin]

I have found it hard to evaluate links on a weekly basis, too. All tools give different results. You need to pick 1 tool, create a spreadsheet, and then track links with that same tool week to week. At least you should know on a relative basis if you're improving or not, even if you're not getting the exact true link count.

The Link Analysis tab of SEOmoz shows some stats (external followed links, followed links root domains, unique C-blocks) that are useful to track over time, but they only update about once a month (note to SEOmoz: weekly would be great)

The one thing you CAN track week to week is your SERP rankings, on the Rankings tab. You can track number of phrases you have in the top 3, as well as number of phrases on page 1. If your external link building is progressing then those numbers should go up week over week.

And those numbers drive your organic search visits per week, which you can view on the Traffic tab, or in Google Analytics directly.

As far as follow/no-follow goes, remember that you want a 'normal' anchor text distribution and usually a normal anchor text profile will include some no-follows. So keep some no-follows in there...

[NickPateman81]

It sounds like your question is about measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts more than anything. In this case, number of external links really isn't going to give much away. Here are some alternative metrics:

Search traffic excluding brand name

Increases in search traffic volume is strongly and positively correlated with SEO. Because you will always rank for brand name queiries and searchers will always find your brand if they are searching for it - these searches add noise which is why we exclude them when measuring SEO effectiveness.

Keyword rankings

You may be focusing on 10 to 20 keywords on your campaign. Measure the rankings and see if the pattern is increasing. However, this metric on its own can be misleading as keyword ranking may not improve while long tail (search) traffic is sky rocketing!

Absolute conversions

The end goal. Have you seen an improvement in the number of conversions? Use Google analytics to set up goals and measure the number of goals coming from visitors that found you through search.

Apologies if I've somewhat strayed from your original question - but I feel that you should not be measuring whether or not your SEO "efforts are fruitful" by monitoring new links.

Nick