Recommended Free Backlink Checkers
Backlinks and Your Site’s Popularity
Backlinks represent the online popularity of your website. Search engines like Google evaluate the popularity of your site based on the number of backlinks, and they assess the authority of your site according to the quality of the links. That is why it is important to regularly evaluate your backlinks using free backlink checkers in order to assess the quality of your links, as well as its quantity versus that of the competitor sites.
Knowing the quality and the sources of your backlinks can make a lot of differences on how your site is going to perform in terms of its search engine ranking. The page rank of the site is largely influenced by the quality and the quantity of backlinks. Therefore, you have to carefully plan the ideal number of backlinks to create each month, and the type of links to build that can help you attain your projections.
Websites are usually aimed to be in the top page of search engine results. But getting to the top is going to be tough, and it gets tougher with higher competition. Since backlinks play a crucial role on ranking, webmasters are now focused on building backlinks when doing search engine optimization.
Two Major Benefits of Backlinks
- Send highly-targeted traffic to your website
- Improve the page rank of your website
While the main goal of link building is to improve the page ranking of the site, it effectively drives high quality traffic as well. The amount of traffic that you will get depends on your backlinking strategies. Among the techniques that are quite effective in sending targeted visitors include article marketing, forum marketing, and social marketing; but among these three the best is article marketing if your contents are high-grade in quality. Submitting articles in high PR article directories like Ezine, as well as in web 2.0 properties like Squidoo and Hubpage, can significantly give your site a boost in traffic on top of improving its ranking. But if you diversify your links using other strategies like forum marketing, social sites marketing, and video marketing, then your site will get even more traffic coming from various sources, thereby improving further its page rank.
However, it is hard to know if your strategies are effective or not. That is why you need to check the backlink data of your site in order to find out if all links you created were considered by the search engines. You can get this data by using an online tool called backlink checker, which you must use regularly for the following reasons:
Benefits of Using the Free Backlink Checker
- Gives you fresh updates on the current number of backlinks to your site
- Helps you find out how many high PR links, mid PR links, as well as backlinks from sites with low page rank
- Allows you to check the relevance of the backlinks to your site
- Gives you the chance to study the backlinks of your competitors including where those links are coming from
- Helps you assess the quality of the links created by the link builders whom you have outsourced the link building to.
List of Online Backlink Checkers
- http://www.backlinkwatch.com
- http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp
- http://www.smallseotools.com/backlink-checker/
- http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com/
- http://www.tidydesign.com/free-backlink-checker/
- http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561345-backlink-checker.aspx
- http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp
- http://search.yahoo.com/
- http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
- http://www.domain-pop.com/
- http://www.highqualitybacklinks.com/backlink-checker/
- http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
Important Data You Can Get From the Free Backlink Checker Report
- Inbound Links – These are links pointing to your site from different sources. This report provides an overview of all backlinks to your website, including the page authority of the site and its page rank in Google.
- Top Pages – This will help you identify the pages in your site with the highest numbers of backlinks, as well as pages with less or no backlinks. With this data, you can modify your link building strategies by increasing the backlinks to pages in your site that have little inbound links, or to pages that you want to highlight more because the conversion rate is good.
- Linking Domains and IP Address – This data assists you in determining the level of link diversification of your site. You can easily see how many domains are linking to your site including their unique IP address. Likewise, you can find out if a particular domain has too much outbound links to your website. For instance, if your link building strategy focuses on article marketing, particularly article submission in Ezine articles, then you can see from this report the number of links from this one domain alone. This should alert you to submit your succeeding articles in other directories if you have too much links from Ezine. Remember, if you are focusing on one link source only then this might hurt your ranking. Link diversification is highly encouraged especially with the Penguin update of Google already enforced. Another way of using this report is to check the domain extensions of your backlinks. You can get an overview of the percentage of domains with .com extension, as well as backlinks from other extensions like .edu and .gov. This is particularly important if you are subscribed to one of the edu backlinking plans of a particular link building service.
- Anchor Text – The anchor text is the keyword used to link to your site. While it is encouraged to use the main keyword phrase as the anchor text for your backlinks, it is also recommended to use related keywords sometimes, especially LSI keywords, to make your links look natural. This report can help you analyze the best performing keywords as anchor text, and modify your link building strategies if necessary.
- Link Metrics Comparison – This is the data to use if you want to spy on the backlinks of your competitors. You can add the url of your competitor sites and the result will show the comparisons with your site in different aspects like page authority, page rank, external links, internal links, linking root domains, and total links among others.
The valuable information that you will obtain from the backlink and website optimization report is already sufficient enough in giving your site a competitive edge over your direct competitors, if you are using the free backlink checker regularly. Proper monitoring is always important in evaluating the progress of your business; in backlinking, tracking your performance is easier with the availability of free online tools, which can only help you if you will take advantage in using them.