6 Free and Useful Backlink Checking Tools

Backlinks are one of the most important and influential factor that determines your websites online success. Hence it is always better to have a healthy number of backlinks to your site. The backlinks also should be from good, relevant and quality sites, other wise your site may lose its reputation and may not get help from these backlinks.

It is always a tedious task to track your backlinks and you cannot ignore it as you need to have an eye on your backlinks on a regular basis. You need to check your backlinks to find out whether your link building campaign is working up to the expectations, whether any bad sites are linking to you, how many authority sites are linking to you etc. There are many paid and free tools for checking your backlinks and they have different advantages based upon your requirement. Here I would like to mention around 6 Free backlink checking tools that are useful and easy to use.

1) WebRank Toolbar - This is a Firefox Addon to check your website's backlinks and shows backlinks as per Google, Bing and Yahoo. Once you install this Addon in your browser you just need to open any website and you can see the backlink details on the browser itself. This toolbar also gives you Google Pagerank, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast Rank and pages indexed.

2) SEO Quake - SEO Quake is another powerful Firefox Addon which helps you to get the number of backlinks for your site. Similar to WebRank Addons, this is also easy to install and use.

3) Backlinkwatch - Backlinkwatch is an online backlink checker and provides you the total number of backlinks your site has got. It give additional informations such as the anchor text used for linking, the PR of the site providing the link, the number of links on the page giving the backlink and the type of the backlink (follow or nofollow)

4) Yahoo Site Explorer - Yahoo Site Explorer is another online tool which lets you see the number of backlinks to your site. You just need to enter your site details and Yahoo will show you the number of backlinks your site has got.

5) Google Webmaster Tools - Google Webmaster Tools is yet another powerful tool by Google which helps you to find out the number of backlinks your site has got and it gets updated on a regular basis. You just need to to have a Google Webmaster account and your site must be verified with the Webmaster account, in order to see the backlink results.

6) SEOCentro - SEOCentro is an online tool for checking your backlink popularity and this tool gives you results from Google, Yahoo, Bing etc and usually send you the report via email.

My First Website - Using Sitemaps

When you create a new website it will be indexed as soon as the crawlers encounter a link to it. In general, you don't have to submit any information to search engines because the web is based on links. If there is a page then there must be also some links that point to this page. Otherwise the page is probably not worth indexing. However, there are situations where crawlers can not discover all the pages you have. This is where you can help them with sitemaps.

Sitemap is an XML file with defined structure. It contains information about all the pages of the website. All major search engines provide a way to submit sitemap files. Google, for example, uses Webmasters Tools as a place where you can submit sitemaps.

The main purpose of the sitemap is to inform search engines and crawlers about all the pages you have. Using this information bots, spiders and crawlers can visit pages even if there is no link pointing to them. But there is also another more important function. By submitting a sitemap file you can track how many pages are indexed by the search engine. This information is very important because in the case you find out that not all pages are indexed you may have a problem. In many cases pages with little or no content will not be indexed. This is normal. Less "normal" is when some article page is not indexed. In some cases you have to wait for a while, while in other cases the reason may be duplicate content or any other reason that makes search engine to think that this page is not worth indexing.

You can also add images, videos, code and geo information to the sitemap file. This way you can inform Google, Yahoo and Bing with all the stuff you think is worth indexing. More information about this possibility can be found at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Creating a sitemap file is pretty easy. All popular content management systems including Wordpress and Joomla have an extension which can automatically create a sitemap file from all the pages of the website. This way you don't have to worry about the file structure and links. There is also a possibility for websites that have no such automatic solution. There are many scripts that can crawl the site by following internal links. Using this information they create the file which can be submitted to search engines.

How to Check Google Pagerank Using Online Tools

Google pagerank is one of the most important factors used to determine the quality of the domain. High pagerank means good chance to rank well in Google for your keywords. No wonder that many webmasters would like to know the pagerank value of their websites. This article will show you how to check Google pagerank using online tools.

There are 3 ways how to check Google page rank Using Online Tools:
1. Online pagerank checker
2. Long-term pagerank checker
3. Google toolbar

1. Online pagerank checker
Online page rank checker is a tool where you enter URL of your domain and the script will contact Google server using API. As a response the pagerank value is displayed. Some Google pagerank checkers offers the textarea where you can paste multiple URL's and the tool checks pagerank of all domains in the same time. If you run a lot of websites you should search for such online tool.

2. Long-term pagerank checker
Long-term pagerank checker works like membership website. After signing up for the account you will set up URLs of your domains. The script will check the pagerank periodically (every day, week or month). As a result, you will be able to watch the graph.

3. Google toolbar
Google toolbar can be installed to your browser (it works in all major browsers, not only in Firefox). When you surf the internet you can see the pagerank value of the website which you are currently watching. If Google toolbar doesn't work for you for any reason you can search for some SEO extension for Firefox.

Search Engine Advertising Advice - 4 Powerful Free Tools You Cannot Miss

Search engine advertising and marketing sounds like a very complicated process especially when you start talking about the tools required. Here are 4 powerful free tools that you cannot miss.

Google Keyword Tool

Before you start most of your campaigns, you must select a list of keywords which are well searched for and highly relevant to your offers. This is a really good keyword tool and it can work for both paid search advertisers and organic search advertisers.

Google Website Optimizer

There are quite a few good split testing software available on the market today and many of them are not cheap. You will be surprised that this free tool beats all of them hands down. It is so simple to use that you can figure out in a few minutes. Free tutorials are also easily available.

Google Webmaster Tools

Would you like Google to give you suggestions on how you can improve your website, which keywords you are ranking for and what position they are at? This is it! It will do all that for you. This is another simple yet powerful tool and I like the fact that it is absolutely free of charge.

Google Analytics

Google bought over a company with web statistics services and gave us the full access for free. There is a lot more functions in this service than you can imagine. You can even look at your sales funnel, where your visitors are coming from and much more. Take time to check it out and you will find out more.

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