The pace of progress accelerates day by day bringing lots of changes into every sphere of human activities. Being one of the most significant areas of modern life, the Internet is not an exception. But no matter what changes may take place in the search world, links still remain the basic element of search engine ranking mechanism. You may stuff your site with great content and exclusive material, but unless you’re making good use of link juice you’ll find it difficult to occupy the top spot in search results.

Comprehensive backlink research lays the solid basis for every link building campaign. That’s the reason you can’t skip it when doing SEO.

At the starting point of backlink building the first step is to check how many incoming links your website has and what value they carry.  You also shouldn’t forget about your on-line competitors and check their sites as well. It will help you to evaluate the time and effort you need to outrank your on-line rivals in #1 placement race. Needless to say that doing this SEO task manually is dead-end monkey work. Rambling in Google, hitting random sites in search of a backlink is ineffective and too time-consuming.

Is there any way out?

Yes! Luckily now you have got a number of SEO tools at your disposal and they can really help you check the linking profile of a website and shape your link building campaign.

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer one of the most popular backlink checkers. It provides users with the list of backlinks to the specified domain. The algorithm is baby-simple: you just go to Yahoo! search and enter: link:yoursite[dot]com and it will redirect you to the site explorer, where you’ll be able to see who is linking to the website. This option is available in other search engines as well, including Google, but they are far less effective, since they provide you only with a small random sample of a site’s link profile.  Yahoo usually gives a much more complete pattern of results.

Site explorer is a great SEO tool, but, alas, it isn’t perfect. Its main drawback is that it never shows you more than 1000 results per domain, so you’ll have to damp internal links and to check links to deeper pages to get more results. Besides the info it provides is rather incomplete: Yahoo Site Explorer doesn’t say anything about SEO value of links, whether they are dofollow or nofollow, what anchor texts are used and other significant SEO aspects.

2. Backlink Watch

It’s a free on-line SEO tool powered by Yahoo! Site Explorer that lets you get a more coherent account on backlink analysis. Together with a list of backlinks to a website it provides you with the information about link value, the exact anchor text of the link or the image for banner links and the total number of outbound links on the page.

3. SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass is an SEO tool that checks and analyzes your competitors’ websites backlinks. It’s paid SEO software with a free version available.  SEO SpyGlass is a breakthrough solution for SEO since at the moment it’s the only SEO software that supports 633 search engines and provides you with a bigger list of links to a site (up to 50,000).

Alongside with that SEO SpyGlass lets you get access to the crucial information carefully broken down for your analysis. This SEO tool says  whether the link is dofollow or not, shows Google PageRank, the number of outbound links on a webpage, value of each link, checks websites for submission into Yahoo! And DMOZ directories and much more.

4. Google Webmaster Tools

Having a Google Webmaster Tools account enables you to check the backlinks to your website that have been indexed by Google. Just follow this three-step instruction: go to Dashboard-> ‘Your site on the web’-> ‘Links to your site’ – and you will see the list of websites that have backlinks to yours. With Anchor Text tab you can also find out what anchor texts are used in the backlinks pointing to your website. This list doesn’t include all the links Google is aware of though, but nevertheless it’s more extensive that the one you may get, if you just use link command on Google search.