Backlinks, also known as inbound links are links from websites that point to your own site. The number and quality of backlinks you have to your site has a profound effect on your site’s page rank and has been described as the backbone of search engine optimisation. If you have many backlinks from high quality authoritative sites with good page rank, it will help strengthen your own site to rank better in the search engines.

There are some great tools available to check your own and your competitors backlinks, all free, providing invaluable information to further help you on your search engine optimisation quest. Here are some that I use:

• Yahoo Site Explorer – I use this frequently, simply type the URL you wish to check the backlinks of and press ‘Explore URL’. Change the ‘Inlinks’ option to show all inlinks ‘except from this domain’. The neat thing about using site explorer is that there is the option to export the results as a tab separated text file (TSV) which you can open in Excel.
• Backlink Watch – nice, no frills backlink checker which also shows the anchor text or banner image of the link
• Analyze Backlinks – Oftentimes, when the above two fail to work; either Yahoo site explorer goes down, or Backlink Watch runs out of its daily quota check, I turn to this.
• SEOMoz Backlink Checker – This is a really comprehensive tool, prodiving you with everything you want to know about backlinks, including graphs and statistics; you must be a member to use this.
• There are many others out there, some with different functions than others, it’s just a case of trying them all out and finding one that works for you.