How To Check Inbound Links

Inbound Links are the external links to your website pages. Inbound links play a very important role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) . The more the good quality inbound links you have, the better the chances of your web page being placed in a good position in search engines. And this is why so many of us spend so much time trying to get good links to our web pages – through directory submissions, article submissions, press releases, forums, reciprocal links etc.

When you are researching on a keyword and analyzing competition, you have to find out how many inbound links your competitors have – I usually check the links of the top three web pages. The more the links, the more difficult it is going to be for you to bump them off and replace yourself in their place.

Once you have a website/page ready, you have to start working on your SEO efforts. Periodically you have to monitor how you are placed in search engines – and a part of this monitoring is to check how many inbound links you have.

Now that we have covered the two main reasons you might want to check inbound links, lets move to the tool you should use to check the links. You can either use Google or Yahoo to check your links.

Google’s result of inbound links is not accurate. Google does not want to help search engine optimizers – Why would they ? Search Engine Optimizers are constantly trying to manipulate its results. And so it is not going to hep them. Don’t use Google for finding out inbound links.

Go straight to Yahoo. And follow the steps:

1. I want to find out the links for http://www.OzKidsActivities.com. So I type in – link:http://www.OzKidsActivities.com in the search bar.

2. Click Web Search.

3. There are two drop downs on the search results (indicated by red arrows in the image below).

In the first drop down select ‘Except from this domain’ – because you are interested only in the links to your page/site from other websites. You are not interested in internal links (internal links are where one page of your website links to another page on your website).

On the second drop down, I chose ‘Entire Site’ – because I am trying to find the inbound links to my entire site. If you want to find out the inbound links for a particular page on your website, then select ‘Only this URL’. Both the options are equally valuable – depends on whether you are trying to find inbound links for a website or a web page.

4. Finally, the number of your inbound links is shown as Inlinks (indicated by red arrow in the image below)

That’s it – Wasn’t that easy. Checking inbound links of your competitors has to be a mandatory step in your ‘competition analysis’. And plus don’t forget your own pages/sites – check internal links regularly and then tweak your efforts accordingly.

Do you use Yahoo or is there some other tool you prefer ?

Best,