Concerned that your competitors are ahead of you in the search engine results pages because they boast more backlinks than you do? This article will show you how to find out the truth with a free online backlink tool; it will also show you how to use that data in your own SEO campaigns.
Assessing the quality of backlinks is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Google ranking algorithms strongly depend on links, and to beat those competitors in the Google Top 10 positions, you need a large quantity of high-quality links.
Up to now there has been no tool in search engine optimization technology that offered precise and accurate measurements to assess the quality and quantity of backlinks.
The good news is that http://www.backlinkwatch.com is a free backlink tool using Yahoo's Site Explorer data. The tool gives the first 1000 backlinks with URL, anchor text and the number of links in that page.
These three important pieces of data are crucial to the backlink analysis of the competitors. Here are the things you can discover with this data:
Unique domains– This issue relates to link popularity. The higher the number of domains linking to you, the more popular your domain will be. Also, the more relevant those pages, the higher the ranking benefits will be.
Anchor text – This cannot be ignored, as it is one of the most important elements in Google's link analysis. The keywords comprising anchor text are heavily weighted in Google's algorithms. If the anchor text used perfectly describes the targeted page, then it will really help the rankings of the targeted page.
Number of links on the page – The lower the number of links on a page, the more it will bleed link juice or page rank to the optimized page. Also, the number of links in the page is an indicator of page quality. This will differentiate a spammy link page from a serious one. On the Internet, a spammy link page contains around 50 to 200 links or even more. A lower amount ensures a good user experience.
The objective of this article is to come up with a standard methodology in counting and assessing the quality of unique backlinks pointing to a site by using www.backlinkwatch.com data. Then this data will be used as input for search engine marketing strategy and planning.
With the advent of free tools online, and the fact that most common computers have MS Excel installed, you do not need to hire an SEO company or avail yourself of paid SEO tools to analyze your competitors' backlinks for you.
After finishing this tutorial, you will be confident that you can do it on your own.
Link Trading 
