How To Check Backlinks

Understanding how to check backlinks is very important if you want to be able to monitor your progress with your SEO program. There are many free ways to do this, if you are only looking for a ‘number’. But if you are wanting to analyze the backlinks you will need to purchase a professional tool that provides detailed analysis.

The free backlink checkers leave a lot to be desired. Most of these programs only provide back link counts to the root domain and you have to wade through ads and other marketing messages to actually get to the numbers they are reporting, not to mention the popup ads. Some even try to force a download of some utility to get the results!

Another problem with the free programs is that they are not very consistent in reporting the number of backlinks you have. Go to different free back link checker sites and you will get different results. Some provide such basic information that it is not hardly even usable. Unless of course you upgrade to their special program that will give you all the details for a low monthly cost.

Here is a partial list of some of these sites:

• http://www.backlinkwatch.com
• http://www.domain-pop.com
• http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
• http://backlinkcheck.com

I say, do not even waste your time with these because there really is no value in the numbers that these free programs provide.

There are numerous paid tools that allow you to check backlinks, but my favorite is a product called Market Samurai. This all-purpose SEO tool provides a ton of functionality, including keyword research, keyword competitive analysis, rank tracking of your keywords and targeted pages, domain searches for keywords, and much more – including tracking backlinks.

Now if you have been wanting to learn how to check backlinks, you are going to love Market Samurai. Although backlink checking is not a separate component of the software, there are two main ways that Market Samurai helps you keep track of your backlinks.

First, in the SEO Competition module, you can add url’s that you want to track. In this module you will be able to view the following information about backlinks for any website – including your own – that you want to track.

• Referring domains to domains – The number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific domain
• Referring domains to pages – The number of unique domains with backlinks pointing to a specific page
• Page backlinks – The total number of backlinks pointing to a specific URL. This does not include any links from the website itself.
• Domain backlinks – The total number of external links pointing to any page on the domain, including deeply nested pages. This does not include any links from the website itself.
• Page .edu/.gov backlinks – The total number of links pointing to a webpage from .edu or .gov domains that are external to the website itself.

As you can imagine, having access to this detailed data for each of the targeted keywords for your website AND your competitors’ websites is invaluable and will help you manage your strategy in securing higher positions.

Secondly, also within the SEO Competition module, there is a PR Analysis feature that is brilliant! This module does a real-time analysis of your backlinks and reports on several critical pieces of data:

• Number of backlinks by page rank of the linking website – in other words, you can see how many links you have from PR0 websites, from PR1 websites, etc. all the way up to PR10
• The anchor text that is used for your backlinks with a count of the total number of instances a particular keyword anchor text is used
• Details of the anchor text by PR site – for example you will see how many anchor text links for each PR site that is providing a link

Again, this type of detailed analysis is extremely important to monitor the performance of your rank building exercise.

We hope this article helps you understand how to check backlinks. But more importantly, we hope that using the Market Samurai tool, you improve your online visibility by being more competitive in the search engines.

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