Sep 11, 2008
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The search engines rely heavily on the analysis of links that point into a website. There are some ways to get an overview of what types and how many links are pointing into a website.
The first thing I do is go to Yahoo Site Explorer as Yahoo provides the most comprehensive information about inbound links. Google does not show all of the links that they actually know about that point to a website. To see what the independent search engines are reporting for links you can type in:
link:http://www.thewebsite.com
This will show you what links are pointing to the website that are being reported by that search engine. As you go through Yahoo Site Explorer you will be able to see links that are pointing to a webpage or the whole website. This will give you a good analysis of who is linking to you.
Another tool that is good to use is Backlink Analyzer that is provided by Aaron Wall with Seobook. This tool will analyze the anchor text that is being used in the links. You can see a video of it in action by Aaron Wall and download it from his website.
It will also show you the deep link percentage and the different types of links that are pointing into a site. There are other link analysis tools out there but these are the ones that most seo professionals use unless they are using a seo software tool.
A good place to start when you are analyzing links is the amount of links, the pagerank of the sites, and the anchor text of the links. This will give you a good idea of what you should start to work on.
Then analyzing your competitors inbound links will show you websites that you could receive inbound links from. If your competitors are getting a link then more than likely you could be able to get a link from them as well.
Always remember when it comes to inbound links it is not just the quantity of links that matter, it is the quality. Having higher quality inbound links is much more useful and effective.