Back Link Checker Tools for SEO

I often receive emails and questions about various SEO tools and how effective they are from my readers and at times from some potential clients asking me which SEO tools do I use and for what. Now people who know me and my work process a bit they know am not a big fan of SEO tools, I believe tools are just good enough to get various types of data but that is just 10 % of a complete SEO process and the success of a SEO campaign depends largely on the analysis, strategy and the implementation of the campaign.

Having said that I must also admit that there are certain cases when we need to use tools and there are some tools for link analysis which can actually be very helpful for SEO consultants like us.

a) Raven Tools– The most highly recommended tool. It would be wrong to call it a tool, rather it is a complete tool set that allows you to not only manage your backlinks effectively but also provides various other help both in terms of SEO and Social Media. In context to link building it allows you to find link opportunities, monitor existing links, store and organize links and a lot more. Its definitely worth a try.

b) Analyze Backlinks – Just put in your domain and hit the search. It gets you almost all necessary info for your links except for the PageRank. You can see the URL, anchor text, total number of outbound links on that page, total links to that page, Title of the page. In addition, if you would like to see if there is a specific text used in that page, you can specify that during the search and the tool is smart enough to check if the link page contains the specified text in the source code.

c) Link Diagnosis – Another nice cool tool for analyzing links however to get full advantage of this tool you will need to install the Firefox extention for this. The web version just shows the links but does not provide much details. The Firefox extention however provides you with a lot of information on backlinks which includes Google PageRank, anchor text, whether the link is no-follow, most popular anchor text, some nice graphs and charts showing the anchor txt and PR distribution and the best part is all these can be exported to CSV format.

d) Smart PageRank – Again a good tool that shows Anchor Text, Page Rank and also whether a link is no follow. They also give you an opion to set preference. While I have used this tool numerous times just before writing this post, I tried checking the tool once again and found it broken, hope the guys fix it fast.

SEOMoz also offers a very nice tool for backlink analysis however, it is available only for its premium members.

Besides all these the tool that I use most commonly to check back links as well as other info about websites is Google Webmaster Central, it is indeed a very useful resource for webmasters.