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. Let’s get started.

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. Backlinks are connections from other pages on the internet to yours. 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. 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. When you look at a backlink report, you can discover how many other sites are linking to yours. More links pointing to your site will get you more traffic.

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. One of my favorite tool is the Yahoo site explorer. 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. Give both tools a try and see which one works better for you.

Why Do I Need To Keep An Eye On Who’s Linking To Me?

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.

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