Did you know that “referrer data” means that a site is linking to you? A backlink simply means a link from some other website to your own. The referrer is the site that hosts that link. You might have more backlinks than referrers, since the referring site might have two or more links to you.
You want to understand where your site visits come from. They come from referrers. The referrer is the website a visitor was on that had a backlink to you. The visitor clicked the backlink and arrived at your door. Google Analytics shows this referrer data.
Those two definitions have a subtle difference. One says that referrer is anyone with a link, one says that a referrer is anyone with a link that someone clicked.
A good SEO (search engine optimization) service provider is interested in reporting the first kind of referrer to its clients: A referrer is any website that links to your website. The thing is, even if no one every clicks on a backlink at a particular referring site, that backlink is still a vital and necessary component of your SEO.
Search engines like Google care about “authority,” which is how important other sites think you are. Whenever someone links to you, they imply that they think you are important, and this helps improve your authority in the eyes of the search engine. For example, suppose I wrote a blog entry about toothpicks, and included a link to All About Toothpicks (is there such a thing?). The link would be a way of saying that I believe All About Toothpicks is authoritative on the subject of toothpicks. With enough such backlinks, Google and the other search engines will start to consider All About Toothpicks authoritative and its page rank will go. Page one, here I come!
It may surprise you to learn that its not easy to determine the number of referrers you have in Google. Many times you’ll see people recommend typing link:www.yourhomepage.com into Google, but that usually gives you only a small portion of your real total. Google Webmaster Tools gives you a more accurate reading. In general, I prefer looking at Yahoo, which will give me a good sense of how SEO is going for both search engines. Type link:http://www.yourhomepage.com into Yahoo to see the results. You can check referrers to the home page only or to the entire site, and you can exclude links from your own site. A good SEO company might provide that information to you more easily.
