Anyone running a website is acutely aware of the importance of having enough inbound, or backlinks coming from other websites into theirs. Not only can you gain valuable website traffic, but good quality links can really help with your website’s ranking in the search engines.

The problem is how can you quickly find out how many inbound links there are coming into your site? One tool that does a really good job of helping with this is Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz.

To get started with this tool is quite simple. Just visit the main Open Site Explorer page, and enter your own website address then Click ‘Search’. Below the blue part of the page you’ll see 6 tabs the first one (open by default) will be the ‘Inbound Links’ tab.

On this tab you’ll see 4 headings: ‘Title and URL of Linking Page’, ‘Link Anchor Text’, ‘Page Authority’ and ‘Domain Authority’. What we’re interested in at present is just how many links there are coming to your site and what sort of quality they are.

Take a look at the links under the ’Title and URL of Linking Page’. How many are there (more is better as long as they are good quality)? What sort of websites are they coming from? Are they reputable sites you’d want linking back to you? Do the linking sites operate in a similar business area to your own?

These are the sorts of questions you need to be asking, when reviewing the inbound links to your website so as to help you develop an effective inbound linking strategy. Learn more about backlings in my detailed Tutorial.

I’m working on further reviews of the Open Site Explorer. Enter your email below in the Free SEO Tips Newsletter so you’ll be the first to know when they are published.

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Related Guides:

SEO Tool Review – Open Site Explorer SEO Tips: Dmoz: The Open Directory Project still matters. Make sure your site is listed SEO Tips: How to find the problem backlinks that make your site fall foul of Google Penguin. SEO Tips: Are your website’s backlinks going to cause it to lose position in Google?