Recognize your competition via back links

Back links is very important in the scope of SEO. You will get an idea of your competitors' link building strategy by exploring the anchor text of a site's back links. Besides you can also understand what people think of the site and get help with your keyword research.

•  Page rank

Page Rank (PR) is one indication of the importance of your site in the SEO world. The scale for Page Rank is logarithmic and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link. The Toolbar Page Rank values are historical rather than real-time values as they are republished about once every three months. If you have an internal architectural problem and your Page Rank is spread across thousands of pages of duplicate content then some of your good content will end up in Google's supplemental results, and won't rank for much.

•  SEO

The back links of a web page may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest outside of SEO. These links indicate who is paying attention and to what page. If you have back links from link farms or black hat sites which you have no control to link to, search engines may not punish you. While if you decide to enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts. Many of the so called SEO gurus don’t understand where page rank comes from very much, and they don’t have much idea of how internal and external links distribute page rank between pages. Make sure your SEO professional must get a clear understanding of page rank and the effect of your site rankings on Google based on the external and internal linkage of your site.

•  Rankings

SEO should be judged by bottom-line improvement, not only by Google rankings since they are important. It's always a good idea to keep track of how your Google rankings are going when the Google bots start re-indexing your website looking for new content and keywords every month. However, interlinking between sites, such as, 100 or so sites on one server or IP can lead to lower rankings in Google. Be careful where you link and who you link to because Google will punish you if a network of interlinked sites on one server usually can be identified as a link-farm.