What Is a Backlinks Checker and How to Use It to Your Advantage?
It is a fact of life that the number of backlinks a website is getting is an indicative of its popularity and search engines will define how high or low a website is ranking on results pages based on these statistical data. As in the past there have been numerous attempts by website owners to trick the system by purchasing a large number of cheap backlinks to make search engines believe that their sites were really popular, a complicated evaluation system has been developed to determine rankings based not only on quantity, but on quality as well.
Why Use a Backlinks Checker
As an owner of a website, you would certainly like your site to rank on the top of search engine results pages. You design and launch a complex online marketing campaign either with your own human resources or by hiring a professional SEO company, and then you find yourself eagerly waiting to harvest the results of your efforts. However complicated and immeasurable online campaigns seem to be, their results can be evaluated way sooner than they start to translate into higher sales figures. Though knowing how many quality backlinks a website is getting is one of the major parameters that search engines use to evaluate websites, these statistics are important not only for search engines, but also for the SEO expert who takes care of a company’s online marketing campaign, for webmasters who are trying to get their websites ranking higher and for website owners and bloggers as well.
What Is a Backlink Checker Tool Good For?
Nowadays there many backlinks checker tools available online, some requiring you to download a small program, while others allowing you to use them online. The website statistics you can obtain with the help of these programs can help you evaluate the efficiency of your campaign and readjust the entire campaign if you find that it doesn’t yield the right results.
These checking tools can be used for evaluating the efficiency of your own campaign by entering your website’s URL into the checker and for checking up on your competition as well, by choosing a domain name owned by another company in your niche. Comparing your own website analytics to the statistical data returned for competitors that outrank you is important, because, this way, you can find out what makes their strategy so successful. In other words, backlink checkers can help you find the points of improvement in your strategy, so that you can soon outrank your competition.
Backlink checkers usually analyze not only the backlink itself, but the anchor texts that contain the links to your site as well, so, with these great tools you can also find out how to use anchors more efficiently.
Using a checker can be useful if you have a new website and you would like to update the links pointing towards your old site: you can simply retrieve the list of backlinks from your old page and contact the external sites your backlinks came from, asking them to update the URL.
Typical Features
Backlink checkers are easy to use and the results are also very easy to interpret. All you have to do is simply enter one or more URLs, depending on how the software works and hit enter.
There are really many backlink checker tools available on various websites; some of them have a paid and an open-source version, too, while others come free of charge. The tools vary widely in terms of the checking possibilities provided, so below you will find a short list of the basic features offered:
- Checking volume and validity – While most backlink checkers inform you about the total number of the backlinks to the website analyzed along with the page rank of each site the backlinks are coming from and they also provide a list of the most authoritative external sites, certain programs are able to check the validity of backlinks and the anchor texts attached to the content as well, and some of these tools will automatically detect links that are no longer alive.
- Statistical tools – Most of these programs can deliver complex statistics about the URLs entered and many include automated emailing as well, for the enhanced availability of the statistics. The statistical data can usually be exported to a spreadsheet for further scrutiny.
- Evaluating single URLs or batches – Some backlink checkers will allow you to evaluate only individual URLs, while others allow for bulk checks as well, saving both time and energy.
- Analyzing popularity on social media – social media presence being an SEO tool used more and more often, there are backlink checkers that will focus on the popularity of your site on social networking sites.
As you see, backlink checkers provide a lot of options. If you consider all these features too complicated, don’t worry: most checkers have excellent tutorials in place that will show you how to use the programs every step of the way, allowing you to make the most of your SEO efforts.
