Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
It's a big wide world out there, with literally millions of topics to monitor,
but we're going to start close to home—with your own Web site.
You may remember that in the last chapter I discussed the diferences
between external and internal information. Internal information is infor-
mation out on the Web that mentions, references, or discusses a Web site
you are interested in tracking. External information is everything else.
When I do presentations about search engines and information trapping,
many people ask me how they can track which Web sites are linking to
theirs and what they're saying about it. So wanting to trap this type of inter-
nal information seems to be a common theme. If you don't have a Web site
for which you want to track interest, you may want to skip this chapter. If
you do have a Web site, you probably have an audience, and this chapter is
your opportunity to learn what that audience thinks of your site!
Advantages of Sleuthing Your Own Site
here are several reasons you might want to know who's linking to your site
or who's reading it.
Plain ol' human curiosity.
You're putting in a great deal of time and
efort into making a Web site available. Wouldn't you wonder just a
little bit who's linking to it and what they're saying about it?
.
To help your business.
If someone's linking to you with cheers, you
want to brag. If they're linking with jeers, you want to know how you
can make it right.
.
To target your content and services.
Perhaps you run a library Web site,
or an ad-driven content site. Knowing what people are saying about your
site can help you focus your content for your audience (“I found a great
article about x but I wish they'd cover y”). And if you know what kinds
of sites are linking to yours, you can approach more of those types of sites
and ask whether they'd like to link to you as well. he more incoming
links, the more people can ind you. And that's good!
.
Trapping General Site Links
Let's start our overview of internal information traps by looking at links to
sites. To track this, we begin with the usual suspects: Google and Yahoo.
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