Over the past couple of years, the landscape of SEO has undergone a lot of changes, but one thing has remained constant; the power of natural and quality backlinks. Old school search engine optimization was all about quantity of backlinks, but now it has come to a place where relevance and quality are much more important. Monitoring the backlinks of your website is one key for running a successful online business and also that of competitors’ websites. You need to know the SEO strategy i.e. keywords, traffic resources and referring domains of your competitors. Monitoring backlinks has also been made easy with the help of numerous tools available today.
Here is a list of some of the smartest and great SEO tools that you can use for monitoring your own and competitors’ backlinks:
SE Ranking: One of the best backlink checkers is SE Ranking that you can use for checking the incoming links to your website based on the data of Google Webmaster Tools. You will have to pay for this tool, which is approximately $9 per month and also offers various other features such as rank tracking, website audit, competitor rank tracking and keyword research. A detailed link analysis can be generated for numerous parameters including follow, nofollow, index, noindex, date discovered, anchor text, social popularity, cached, not cached and a lot more.
Backlink Watch: One of the simplest and easiest tools for tracking a website’s backlink portfolio is Backlink Watch. You can take advantage of this tool for free and it can return about 1000 links without exporting reports. This tool can be relied upon.
MoonSearch: Another free backlink monitoring tool is MoonSearch, which checks the number of backlinks that have been indexed and can also provide you with a complex link analysis. You can also use this tool for keeping track of information concerning PageRank, Alexa Rank and reputation based on Dmoz, Yahoo etc.
SEO Spyglass: Although this tool is pretty new, you can rest assured that it provides you with excellent results. Its database of indexed backlinks is approximately 15,000,000,000,000, which is more than the top backlink monitoring tools. It allows you to check around 1,100 links free of charge, but you will have to get the paid version if you want to export results.
Ahrefs: One of the best and top SEO tools that exist nowadays for monitoring backlinks is Ahrefs. You can get a free version, which offers you the ability of checking 10 backlinks and 2 domains for every request. As far as the paid version is concerned, it costs about $79 per month and gives you a complete analysis of the backlink profile. According to an expert from Rockstar-marketing.com, an internet marketing company, Ahrefs is a lifesaving tool in case you are penalized by Google; it provides you with exact percentage of anchor text found on the website.
Backlink Test: You can get a complete list of incoming and outgoing backlinks with this particular tool and it is an ideal tool for rough use.