Knowledge Bubble

I’m sure you’ve heard the terms backlinks and link building. Are you curious to learn more about what exactly backlinks are, how you can find them and what you can then do with that information. It’s an important topic that plays a big role in how much traffic your site gets. Here’s what you need to know.

What Is A Backlink?

Let’s start by looking at what exactly backlinks are. Backlinks are connections from other pages on the internet to yours. By pointing and clicking on various links, we move from one page to the next. I’m willing to bet that a link brought you to this post you are reading right now. It may have been a link on a website or in an email that you clicked, or maybe you searched for something on Google, clicked on a result and found me that way. By looking at your backlinks you can find out how many other pages on the web are linking to you. The more links you have the more traffic you usually get to that page.

How Do You Find Out Who’s Linking To You?

There are quite a few link popularity tools out there that you can use to find out who’s linking to you. There are some pricey products out there and even companies that will put together backlink reports for you, but I prefer some simple and best of all free tools. The first tool I go to when I do a backlink check is the yahoo site explorer tool. It allows you to enter the url of any web page and will then show you how many pages yahoo has indexed for that site and more importantly how many backlinks the site has. You can look at both the links pointing to the the entire domain (in other words, each page of a particular website), or you can look at the links to just a specific page. Another good tool is the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox which will give you a lot of the same information for each web page you look at and even the pages on a search results page. I recommend you try them both and then pick the one that is easiest for you.

Why Is It Important To Check Backlinks?

Let’s talk for a minute about why you should keep an eye on who’s linking to your sites. For starters you want to make sure that your link building efforts are paying off. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s also a good idea to keep track of who else is linking to you. You never know when you come across a potential new JV partner or someone you could guest blog for etc.

Here’s an extra tip for you. You can apply this same strategy to find out who is linking to your competitor’s site. Once you know who is linking to them, you can approach those sites and get links to yours. It’s a great strategy to get more links and outrank your direct competitors for any given keyword. And now I would like to invite you to learn more about backlinks and how you can start generating more high-quality links to your site. If you could use more targeted traffic to your site, look at this link building program.