Backlink Checker

One of the main contributing factors of search engine position for a particular keyword is the number of links directed to your website pages from relevant, quality websites. Also important is the way the link is presented to search engines. We can investigate how many links are coming to our website and use this information to improve our search presence. We can also identify which links our competitors are targeting.

Yahoo Site Explorer
The information useful to us in this instance is how many links are directed to out website and from where.

To do: Follow this link siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Enter your website in the top field and click explore url
Click the button inlinks
From the drop down choose Except from this domain to Entire site

Firstly let us identify if we need to step up our link building activities. If we see a low number score next to the inlinks button then yes, we need to do more work. But even if we have a low number the area to look at here is the quality of the links. We can click each link to find where the link is on the page and how it is structured. Ideally the link should have our targeted keyword as the anchor text.

Some questions to ask ourselves

• For low numbers should you consider a link building campaign?
• Do the links contain keywords which we are targeting in the search engines?
• Are the links on pages which have a relevance to your website?
• Do links only target your homepage or are they also helping to promote pages within your website?
• Would you class the website your links are on as important, well viewed websites?
• Where are your competitors getting their links from? Can you get some on these pages as well? Quite often links would not be allowed on a web page if there is an identical Anchor text link on them (some one using the same text in their link as you are). What makes your website unique so to encourage the website owner to place a link to you?

Related information:
Anchor text explained