Backlink checker tools are one of the most important SEO technique you must use. Checking backlinks is a critical factor in websites ranking. They are usually named inbound links, incoming links etc.  They indicate the importance and a popularity of a page and Search Engines use it to evaluate pages. Most of the times your website has a lot of backlinks but you are not aware of that and you may not know where they come from.

Know your backlinks and track them is very important for SEO. This is much more important after the latest Google Panda and Google Penguin updates. There are some online free services and tips you can use to discover and analyze them and will be surprised to find unknown backlinks pointing your website you did not expect.

1. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO offers a large and updated database to find out a great number of inbound links to your site. It it probably the most complete backlink checker to analyze backlinks. Registration is required to access the Free Site Explorer. You can search from the Fresh Index or from the History index. They have other tools also here.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very good tool to check backlink sources. All you have to do is to create an account, add the code to your website and start tracking visitors in the traffic sources. You can track All Traffic, Direct, Referrals, Search and Campaigns.

3. BackLink Watch

BackLink Watch is a very powerful backlink checker to find backlink sources. It will give also the PR (Page Rank) and the OBL (Outbound link) ratio, lower OBL is better.

4. Backlink Finder

Backlink Finder is another great tool to understand where your links are ocming from. This is very complete and gives you a lot of information from different sources like: Google, Alexa, Yahoo! and Bing, Dmoz.

5. SEOMoz Open Site Explorer

SEOMoz Open Site Explorer also offers a good set of information to explore your sources: inbound links, Top pages, Linking domains, Anchor text, Link Metrics. Although it doesn’t give you many sources, you can use it as well.

6. Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer is very powerful and one of my favorite backlink checker tool. This service gives you a lot of information and it’s very complete in all aspects. A very useful feature is to check anchor text, very important for SEO. You need to register to see more.

7. Link Diagnosis

Link Diagnosis offers a good set of features. Very useful to have in your SEO arsenal. You can set filters for PR, engine, site settings, speed and report type.

8. Alexa

Alexa is also a good choice to find out backlink sources. Just go to Alexa and check for “Sites Linking In”. Alexa is quite approximative supply information and it doesn’t get updated often. Good for old websites. New websites will not benefit from it.

Via smartmediatips