You surely know the importance of backlink checkers for the success of your website. But with so many competitive backlink checker tools available on the market, choosing the right one can be intimidating. Read this list and you will find out the right choice.

You will learn:

• About backlinks, and types of backlinks.
• How to do link building in 4 ways: Earn, create, build, and press release.
• The best 5 backlink checker tools

Backlinks play an important role in improving your search engine rankings. The more high-quality backlinks to your website you can get, the stronger your chance of ranking higher.

Yet, building backlinks is not an easy process. It requires time and effort. You need to gain backlinks, monitor those, and analyze the effectiveness. And of course, you cannot do these works manually. 

Luckily, you have a backlink checker on your side. The best backlink checker will help you to get all your work sorted.

You will know how to effectively build backlinks. Discover the best 5 backlink checker tools in this article. Let’s get started.

Understand Backlink:

What is it? 

Backlinks are when another website links a particular page back to your site. They are also known as external links and inbound links.

They provide a vote of confidence for your website and your content.

Why it is needed for SEO

Backlinks are highly valuable for SEO. Generally speaking, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it gets from Google.

According to Impactplus, high-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search.

How exactly do backlinks help with your content?

• Backlinks boost your Google rankings: Everyone wants to get higher rankings on Google, so this is by far the most popular benefit.
• Backlinks bring direct traffic to your website: That traffic can turn into a conversion on your site and this is probably the second most popular benefit. 
• Backlinks establish your brand in your online marketplace: When you get backlinks from top blogs and sites in your industry, people will remember and respect your brand. This is a long-term strategy that should not be ignored, especially if you need to justify your work to your boss or client.
• Backlinks attract more backlinks naturally: Of course, this is like the results that many people don’t realize. If you’ve already got some quality backlinks on busy sites, a percentage of people on those sites will also write about and link to you – without you even asking.

Popular types of backlinks

Backlinks can be of various kinds. Valuable backlinks share several key traits such as:

• Coming from trusted and authoritative websites
• The website they’re coming from is topically related to your site
• They include your target keyword in the link’s anchor text
• They come from a domain that has never been linked to you before

However, 3 types of backlinks below are often considered to be beneficial. These are:

• Backlinks from guest blogs: Guest blogging is actually one of the best ways to acquire a link from an authoritative site of your own choice.
• Editorial backlinks: Such types of backlinks are the hardest to get. They often occur organically when people link to you because your content, products, or services are relevant to them. By linking to you, someone offers their own visitors an opportunity to leave the linking site and check out yours. To get such backlinks, you do not need to make any specific moves besides creating content, but you have to create link-worthy content.
• Acknowledgment backlinks: This way you not only acquire safe relevant backlinks but also spread the word about your brand and build ties with your industry peers. It might be linked from the organizer's site; social media posts mentioning your brand and linking to you. 

How Can You Do Link Building?

Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving search engine visibility.

Backlinks can arrive by chance – someone just comes across your site and thinks “wow, my readers will love this” and shares it with them. It’s great when that happens, but it’s a really rare event. If you just wait for those kinds of backlinks to appear, you’ll only get a trickle – not enough to have any effect on your search engine rankings.

There are four ways to get more backlinks: create them, earn them, build them or get from press releases.

#1. Earning backlinks: 

This is when people discover your content via search engines like Google, social media, or word of mouth, and choose to link to your page. In other words, earned backlinks are organic. 

There are some link-building techniques, such as content creation, which can show people the expertise of your company, and this can go a long way toward building your brand. For example, if you create a piece of content based on industry data and publish it, you have a chance of becoming well known in your industry. You can improve your chances of earning more backlinks by creating truly useful content that people should want to link to.

#2. Creating backlinks: 

This is when you manually add links to your site from other websites. Examples include submitting to business directories, leaving blog comments, and replying to forum threads.

You can also create your list of contents, which links together. This might require your time to make a lot of blogs, articles, and so on.

#3. Building backlinks: 

Building backlinks is when you reach out to other site owners, editors, or webmasters and ask them to link to your page. For this to work, you need to have a clear value proposition. That’s where link-building tactics come in. Link building can often involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. This outreach frequently relates to the promotion of something that you've just created, such as a piece of content or an infographic. 

A common goal of outreach is to get a link, but there's much more to it: Outreach can help you build long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry, and these relationships can cause your business to become highly regarded and trusted. 

#4. Send press release

Press releases are a goldmine for traffic and backlinks. Other benefits of a press release distribution include increased visibility and trust, the opportunity to brand yourself as an industry expert, and getting more customers.

But, as with many other ways on this blog, there are a lot of marketers sending out press releases currently and you need to be smart about it. 

After all, you want to get your backlinks from prestigious press releases. You can use a tool called MarketersMedia.

MarketersMEDIA has a great network of big media brands like MarketWatch, AP News, Yahoo News, ABC, CBS, Fox, and others. Don’t you think it’s amazing to get your business mentioned on these media sites that are viewed by millions? You can make your business information visible and build your backlinks over reputable sites. As a result, you also build credibility and authority among your customers.

Understand Backlink Checker

What is it? 

A backlink checker is a piece of software that crawls a given website to find which other websites are linking to it. 

Backlink checkers are useful when you are building a backlink portfolio. It can help you to be aware of links you don’t already know about, and help you keep track of all of your backlinks.

How to use it? 

Every backlink checker is different. With most backlink checkers, you need to register an account, pay any associated subscription fees, and either install software or visit the backlink checker’s website. From there, it’s just a matter of plugging the desired website into the backlink checker, waiting for results, and downloading the reports.

A backlink checker can also help you find your competitors’ links. This can help you in a multitude of ways. For example, you can try to get some of those links yourself; and you can also make more informed decisions about how many links, or which kinds of links you may need to overtake them in organic search engine results.

Top 5 best backlink checker tools

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a top-tier backlink checker.

You get both a live index for your backlinks, plus recent and historical indices. You can see lost backlinks as well as how they intersect with each other so that you can reach out to other sites that might be able to provide a link or two, as well. 

Additionally, you can get daily, weekly, or monthly notifications on gained and lost backlinks so that you can manage your position in SERPS effectively and efficiently. 

With Ahrefs, you can spy on your rivals' SEO methodologies, their backlinks, keywords, and different perspectives. 

However, Ahrefs doesn’t have a free option like some backlink checkers, you certainly get what you pay for with this service.

Majestic

Majestic SEO has made a name for itself through reliability and accuracy. 

You can easily check the backlinks of websites from here: Just enter the URL of the site you want to analyze, then hit the search button. The displaying results will give your insight into the sites' link profile, which constitutes external backlinks data, referring subnets, referring domains, and IPs.

By scrolling further, you will see the backlink history chart and the anchor text charts. The two statistical charts give even a better analysis in terms of visual display. 

You can have a look at your backlinks, plus historical data on where has linked to you and where might be a good place to look to get more. You can also build your own reports and apps using their API, and one of their newest features is the link context report. Rather than simply giving you anchor text and a URL where it was used, the link context report will give you the actual content of the website that is linking to you.

Moz

Moz, technically Moz Pro, is probably one of the most user-friendly tools.

You get detailed reports on your linking domains, inbound links, anchor text, ranking keywords for the site, and domain authority. The tool offers dependable results from page authority to domain authority. It gives complete metrics of any link associated with the site before and presently.

In addition, Moz has resources from which you can even learn more on how to rank a site at the top of search engines.

SEMRush

When you dig in with SEMRush, you can find out how many domains are linking to your site, which links are dofollow or nofollow, historical links and which ones have been lost, and the anchor text that is attached to each link.

You get a breakdown of country-of-origin for each backlink, TLD distribution, and a backlink competitor list (where you can find sites with similar backlink profiles to research how you differ and can get new backlinks). 

As you might expect, this tool is designed specifically to help you find link opportunities and use email outreach to get the links you want.

SEMRush does offer a limited free account option, which is great for those on a budget or who are just starting out with backlink-building campaigns.

BacklinkGap

With this amazing tool, you can find out who has linked to you and remove broken links that can hurt your rankings

If you are starting a brand new blog and need a backlink checker all-in-one, I would recommend BacklinkGap because it's super affordable and pretty reliable.

You can see a number of useful data is ready for you in the dashboard, such as a number of backlinks, total referring domain, new & lost backlinks, new & lost referring domain, etc.

BacklinkGap also has graph views to help you see the overall data easier. You can even see the backlink types, link attributes or link categories.

If you want to get the CSV files, or export the report for your backlink profiles, BacklinkGap can help you with that.

TL;DR

An SEO backlink checker is quite important these days. 

The above-mentioned tools will help you to check backlinks to your website. Also with the help of these best backlink checker tools you can check the backlinks of competitors as well. 

Well, the opinions here can differ, especially when we also consider feature familiarity. 

Nonetheless, when looking at both feature performances against pricing, BacklinkGap tends to be slightly better than the rest. What's more, they are beginner-friendly and quite reasonably affordable.