How To Check Backlinks With Yahoo Site Explorer
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?
Before we talk about finding out who’s linking to you, let’s talk for a sec about what a link is. A link is a connection between two pages on the web. We get from page to page by clicking on links. Chances are you clicked on a link to find this article you are reading now. That link may have been in an email, on a website or on a Google search results page. 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. This tool allows you to look at either all the links pointing to a website, or you can search for the backlinks to a particular url or page. I also like and use SEO Quake quite a bit. It is a firefox pluin that will show you backlink counts along with all sorts of other interesting data for both search results and any page you are looking at in your browser. I recommend you try them both and then pick the one that is easiest for you.
Why Is It Important To Check Backlinks?
There are a couple of good reasons why you want to check on your own backlinks. First of all 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. Ready to learn more about backlinks and how you can start generating 1000s of them for your sites. If you could use more targeted traffic to your site, look at this link building program.
Yahoo Backlink Checker Starter Video.mov
