Finding out who's linking to you

One of the most interesting things about blogging is finding out whether other bloggers think you're interesting. After all, blogging is like any other type of writing, you want an audience. The bigger your audience, the more (apparently) interesting you are. And how do you measure the degree of interest? --By the number of people who either link to you or mention you in a blog.

There are several ways to keep track of who is talking about your blog. Today, we'll look at Technorati which is a service that tracks blog links. If you enter your blog's URL, it will search for links and for blogs that mention your blog site. This can serve two purposes for you: it can enable you to jump to the blog that mentions you to see what they had to say, and it can give you an instant picture of how "important" your blog is. This importance factor is the same measure Google uses to rank your site. If you look at la-legal.com, for example, through Technorati's eyes, this is what you get:



The return show there are 50 "inbound links" and 32 "inbound blogs" to the site. Technorati then displays a summary of who posted and the context which you can order by freshness or by "blog authority." Blog authority is the ranking the blog that mentions you or links to you has.

The Technorati basic service is free. Technorati has more advanced features for a nominal price of $5-$10 per year. These services include watch lists and comparisons of competing sites along with objective measurements of your site's performance.

Technorati is not the only source for this type of information. We plan an article for the near future that compares and reviews link reporting services.