Sunday Morning SEO: Why Should You Evaluate Sites?
by Dee Barizo on January 31st, 2010 
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In my last post, I talked about using an SEO tool to evaluate a site’s link authority. In this post, let’s look at why you should be evaluating sites and how to apply the information you get from your research.
Getting quality backlinks is the best competitive advantage you can get in SEO. Backlinks are a major part of the search engines’ algorithms and it’s much harder to copy someone’s backlinks than their keywords.
You can focus on keywords but keywords are easy to implement. Once a webmaster figures out that they are important, he can look at the free keyword tools, find relevant keywords, and then add on their website. Compare that process to building links on quality sites.
That’s why the search engines place a lot of value to backlinks on their algorithms. With the early search engines, you could just place keywords on your site and you would rank pretty quickly. Savvy SEOs realized this and created many low quality sites that dominated the search results. Google became the best search engine by focusing more on links instead of keywords on a site. This focus helped Google create search results filled with more quality sites than their competitors.
The link request can be a very effective tool for link building but it seems to be underused by bloggers. Many of them are hesitant to ask for links. They think it is too intrusive and spammy. Or they are not confident in their content.
