You all may know how important backlinks are for any blog. If you are not aware of this term “backlinks“. This article will clear you what backlinks are? and why are they so important for your website/blog?
Are you concerned about your competitor’s backlinks?
Having good quality backlinks is not so easy these days. So we can look into our competitor’s backlinks and can try to reach those good quality sites for backlinks.
Want to find out about backlinks pointing to your own blog?
This job can be done now with backlink checker tools. All you want to do is to put your blog’s URL in backlink checker tools and all your backlinks will be visible to you.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are the incoming hyperlink from one website to another. Backlinks are also known as ‘Inbound links’. SEO revolves around building quality links. Inbound links help a website score well in search engine result page rankings.
Earlier, it was believed the more backlinks; the more is your website score. No matter it is a quality backlink or a low-quality one. People use to submit it uncountable times on web directories and social bookmarking sites. This encouraged a link spam. Webmasters tend to gain as many links regardless of the relevancy.
The trend is changed since penguin update rolled out. Now, Low-quality links can drop your website scores like Domain Authority, Page Rank etc.
Importance of Backlinks
Google accounts for the number of backlinks and their source to determine Google’s Page Rank. Thus backlinks are directly responsible for a website’s position in SERP and its popularity. An Inbound Link to a website means referrer is crediting the destined website. To build quality links, contextual backlinking should be encouraged. It implies backlinking to a related niche website.
Let me summarize the benefits of quality backlinks in points:
Improve Organic Rankings: Quality links help your page rank higher in SERP.
Faster Indexing: Search engine bots crawl the links in a defined manner. A backlink from a prominent site may help the bots to discover your web page in a shorter span of time. If you are a novice in the field. It will help you well.
Swarming Traffic: ‘Referral Traffic’ is the major reason you will see so many guest post request in your inbox. A link from a high-quality website may give you genuine traffic and in good numbers. This traffic will be real and with low bounce rate.
Here are top Backlink Checker Tools to monitor your competitors:
#1. Semrush:
Semrush is not completely free but it offers a free trial for 14-days. It is a most powerful backlinks checker tool. It analyzes all incoming links on your website. It conducts a deep analysis and tells you the type of backlinks, ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’. You can find the geographic location of the links and know your domain authority. It allows you see your anchor texts and let you compare backlinks on competitor’s domain.
Here are some MUST READ articles on SEMrush Tool:
- SEMRush Review: A Perfect Tool To Keep Ahead of Your Competition
- The Golden Guide To Find High CPC Keywords Using SEMrush
#2. Buzzsumo:
Buzzsumo let you see Inbound links for any domain. It comes in two versions free and pro. PRO has more features over free versions. You can apply time filters for a better grasp. It even allows you to know total backlinks and backlinks to root domains. You can export backlink data in .csv and excel format for offline analysis. You can see the number of times your content is shared on various platforms.
#3. Open Site Explorer:
It is my favorite backlink checker tools by SEOMoz. I would recommend it personally. It also comes in two versions FREE and PREMIUM. You can search 3 backlinks per day with the free version; the premium version lets you check unlimited backlinks. You can see your competitors’ inbound links using the DA value and ANCHOR TEXT.
#4. Ahrefs:
Although it is paid tool, if you register for a free account, you can fully analyze backlinks with your site’s anchor text analysis. You can have details of increasing and decreasing the number of backlinks, their types image backlinks etc. This can help if you failed out in penguin update. You can even export the report tracing the below-given path.
Backlinks ? external ? backlinks ? new/lost? export
#5. Backlink Watch:
It is easy to use. It allows you to check backlinks of any domain, be it your or anyone. Â It will let you see anchor texts, page rank, and backlinks. Backlink Watch gives authentic results. The results are based on Ahrefs API. Although, you don’t have the export feature here. You can follow the instructions below.
Copy all reports » open spreadsheet » right click » paste text » done (perfect).
#6. Link Diagnosis:
Links diagnosis works best with Firefox. Though, it is available on all search engines. It assists you in backlink checking, their type (dofollow or nofollow), missing links, broken links etc. It even traces external links.
#7. SEO spyglass:
This tool is new in the niche but provides great results. It has a vast database of 15,000,000,000,000 indexed links. It is actually desktop software. It allows you to check all links one go. You get error-free reports of fresh links.
#8. Majestic SEO:
Majestic SEO incurred more than 10k users so far. This comes in FREE and PAID plans. They have collected a huge database of indexed backlinks and vows to provide the fresh backlink data report. Their database is based on links’ quality. You can see all your backlinks, their sources and the crawl time. It has a simple interface. You just have to type your domain name in the search box. You can access the link profile of your competitors and view their strategies.
Some other backlink related articles you may like to read:
- Best Strategies And Tools To Find Long-Tail Keywords
- How To Remove Bad Backlinks Using Google Disavow Links Tool
All the above said links will help you lot in backlink analysis. Generating backlinks is very simple and worthy. Write quality posts, comment in forum and communities, and submit on reliable directories and practice guest posting on quality websites.