With the Internet's speed and rate of growth, who has the time to keep up with everything on it, let alone analyze your website's link structure to see what sites are linking to you? So asks Nick Stamoulis in a recent post at the Search Engine Optimization Journal. Still, "it is important to really understand the link structure of your website," Stamoulis observes, "so you know where to make improvements and where to ratchet things down." He then offers an example of how to play your link-building cards right with Google.

To gain behind-the-scenes information about how Google sees your site, Stamoulis advises installing Google Webmaster Tools. Here are just some of the diagnostics he reports the tools provide:

Links to Your Site. The Webmaster tools show you all the links that are pointing to your site as well as all your own internal links. According to Stamoulis, knowing who is connecting with you can help you determine your link-building direction.

Crawl Errors. You'll see in detail any crawl errors occurring on your site. "This is important," Stamoulis explains, "because you want to know if certain areas of your website are having a difficult time being read by the search-engine crawlers."

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