If we’ve ever done an SEO audit or review of your website, then you’ve probably heard me preach from high atop Mt. SERP about the importance of linking, both internal and external. Internal links, of course, are links from one page or post of your site to another page or post within your site. And external links are those that point to websites other than your own.

Have you ever wondered how many people are clicking on those links that you so diligently craft with keyword-rich title descriptions? Of course you have!

If you track your website’s statistics with something like Google Analytics, then you can get detailed stats each page of your site and what links your visitors click the most. Log in to Google Analytics (which is free) and go to Content and find the page for which you wish to see click stats, and near the bottom right, click on “In-Page Analytics” under “Click Patterns.”

For each page of your site, you’ll see who how many times each link on that particular page was clicked by your visitors as well as the corresponding percentage. This is especially useful to get an idea of what menu/navigation items your visitors gravitate toward the most.

If you’d rather not dig into Google Analytics that deeply just to see snapshot of how many clicks your links are getting, there’s another way, but it’s really limited to just the text in your posts or content, and not so much your static links such as your menu or navigation links.

Bitly.com is a great tool that works for me. I set up a free account and when I write a blog post, instead of adding the full URL, I create a bitly short URL for each long-form URL, which allows me quickly see how many times each of my links have been clicked (see below).

One last note about bitly.com is that you can customize the short url. For example, if you wanted to create a bitly short URL to your facebook, you could create http://bit.ly/myfbpage, assuming, of course, someone else hasn’t taken it. Happy URL shortening!