If you own or manage a website, you need the right SEO strategy that will get your pages to the top of the SERPs catapulted. This is where a suitable backlink tool comes into play!
Your SEO strategy should have the creation of excellent and original content as its top priority. In second place should be a good Linkbuildingstrategy, with which you get many links pointing to your pages - so-called Backlinks.
What should I look out for in backlink tools?
If you're on the hunt for the perfect backlink tool, it's a bit like shopping for a car: You want the best value for money and all the features you really need. Here we go:
1. data quality
Firstly, the tool should work on a solid database. If the tool uses the Backlinks is not recorded correctly or the data is out of date, it won't do you any good. Imagine you buy a car, but the sat nav is from the 90s - not really helpful, is it?
2. user-friendliness
The interface should be intuitive. Nobody wants to spend hours studying an instruction manual just to find out how to do the basics. It's like a car with too many unclear buttons and levers - you want to get in and drive off.
3. analysis functions
It should not only show you where the links come from, but also how valuable they are. Is there information about Domain Authority, Page Authority or Trust Flow? It's like a car with a super on-board computer that gives you all kinds of statistics - from speed to tire pressure.
4. competitive analysis
A great feature is the option to change the Backlinks of your competitors. It's like being able to take a look under the hood of the other cars in the race. Very valuable for adapting your own strategy.
5. export and reporting functions
You should be able to export the data easily, preferably in different formats. Imagine you could simply transfer the data from your on-board computer to your cell phone and always have it to hand. Ingenious, isn't it?
6. cost-benefit ratio
Last but not least, the price should of course also be right. There are free tools that offer basic functions and premium tools that can do everything and more. Of course, you don't want to pay for features you'll never use, just like you don't need a car with a built-in whirlpool if you only want to drive to the supermarket.
Illustration: The backlink tool is like your racing team in Formula 1. You want a team that not only tells you how fast you're going, but also how you can change your tactics to overtake the others. It should also show you which parts of your car (or in this case, your website) need attention so you don't suddenly break down on the track.
That should give you a good overview. Pay attention to these points and you'll find the perfect backlink tool for your needs. 🛠️🔗
Use cases of backlink tools
Backlink tools are like the Swiss army knife for anyone who is serious about SEO. From research to competitive analysis, these tools can cover a lot of things. Imagine you're a detective and this tool is your super spy gear. Here are the main use cases:
1. backlink analysis of your own website
This is the classic. You can use all Backlinks to track and analyze your website. It's like doing a health check for your website. Which domains are linking to you? Are they high quality or just spam?
2. competitive analysis
With a good backlink tool, you can also use the Backlinks of your competitors under the microscope. It's like uncovering your competitor's magic trick and seeing how you can even improve on it.
3. link audit
Do you want to remove links that could harm you? A backlink tool will help you identify toxic links that could negatively impact your rankings. Imagine your car has a flat tire and you want to find out which one it is before you hit the track.
4. content marketing strategy
By analyzing the Backlinks you can find out what kind of Content the most and the best Backlinks attracts. It's like learning which lure works best for which fish.
5. link building
Last but not least, you can use the tool to identify potential websites for Linkbuilding identify. Just as if you were looking for suitable places for treasure hunts, except that the treasure here is a high-quality backlink.
Why are backlinks so important?
Search engines prefer websites that are relevant for the searched Keyword represent a figurehead. This means that these pages appear in the top positions in the SERPs for these search terms or, even better, in the "Featured Snippets", which gives you a Traffic will guarantee an increase
To get from a Search Engine to be classified as authoritative, the website must fulfill a number of conditions. One of these is to have as many Backlinks as possible.
Now you're probably thinking: "That's easy, I can place lots of links to my site on other sites that I own and the problem is solved." In the end, it's not quite that simple. you don't just need any Backlinks but high quality Backlinks.
When it comes to the SERP-Not all links are equally good. There are good links, i.e. links that come from other authoritative sites for the same keywords. These will increase your SERP-push up the rankings. And then there are bad links, also called toxic links. You should avoid or get rid of these because they can ruin all your SEO efforts.
A backlink can be considered toxic for many reasons, but they all point to the same concept: a backlink is toxic if it is not authentic. A toxic link can be completely artificial, such as being placed on a page full of links to unrelated pages with even more unrelated content. This could be a paid backlink, and search engines hate that. Any links on unsafe websites or on pages with a low reputation are also considered toxic.
Link building strategies
Basically, every Linkbuilding-strategy boils down to the same idea: you need to generate links to your website on reputable websites that don't belong to you. Wondering how you can do that? Well, first of all, you should know that it's not easy. You need to discover hard-to-find opportunities, keeping in mind that your competitors are doing the same.
So what you need are good backlink tools to uncover these opportunities. Remember the gold rush: the miners with the best picks and shovels had the best chance of finding gold nuggets. We'll talk about tools below; first, let's look at some tips for what the tools can be used for.
First of all, you should rule out the obvious backlink ideas. Yes, you can write a comment on a blog post and include a link to your Website and it is possible that this link will bring you some visitors. But the probability is high that it will not bring the SERP-information that the search engines take into account in order to find your Ranking to increase (or decrease). Most of these easy-to-post links will be marked with the "nofollow" attribute, which suggests to search engines to include all SERP-information before deleting it crawl.
"nofollow" is one of four attributes that can be added to a link to tell search engines what to do with this link. There is also the standard attribute "dofollow", which has the opposite effect: it suggests that search engines should not use the SERP-information when they crawl the link.
There are two other attributes: "ugc" and "sponsored".
UGC stands for User Generated Content (user-generated content) and can be used to identify links that have been inserted in content created by the users of a website. For example, in comments or forum entries. Finally, the term "sponsored" is used to indicate links that have been created as part of advertising, sponsorship or another remuneration agreement.
Black Hat and White Hat
If you have simple (or automated) Link building-tactics, you will hear about "white hat" techniques and "black hat" techniques. As you've probably guessed, a white hat is good and a black hat is bad. By "black hat" we mean foul tricks that can be dangerous to your SEO because search engines don't like them and if they find out you're using them, your SERP-rankings to the bottom places in the Search results slip.
So let's take a look at some white hat techniques.
Your first priority in this matter should be to work on your Range to work. You need to identify potential websites that could benefit from a link to your website, get their contact details and send them messages asking them to link to your website. But you don't have to search randomly to figure out who to send these emails to. With the right tools, it's easy to do.
Guestblogging is a tried and tested tactic that works pretty well. You need to offer bloggers to write a post for their blog that includes your name and a link to your site. There are many blogs that welcome guest bloggers, it is difficult to find them.
There are many more Link building-tips that you can use - you can find dozens of them in good blogs about SEO. However, a comprehensive backlink strategy involves more than just link building. It also requires you to regularly check and monitor your backlink inventory. And that's something you can't do manually. So let's talk about backlink tools.
Backlink Management Tools
The large number of tools that help to implement a successful backlink strategy gives us a sense of how important Backlinks are. In this universe of tools, the most useful ones keep track of the web of Backlinks throughout the Internet and support you with your Link building and management.
Just don't be dazzled by "magic" tools that promise to automatically Backlinks to your side; always remember that Link building is not an easy task and cannot be done well by any automated backlink tool.
The best tools can give you all the information you need about your backlink profile and that's what matters here.
Backlink Tool from Ahrefs
Ahrefs has one of the largest backlink indexes in the world.
In addition to the management of Backlinks is Ahrefs is designed to take over most of the tasks of an SEO professional, although it is also quite easy to use for non-professionals. Especially in the area of Backlinks offers Ahrefs a lot of tools for backlink research.
With a tool called "Link Intersect", for example, you can find out which websites link to your competitors but not to you. This is very useful information, because if a site links to more than one of your competitors, there is a good chance that you will be successful with a query here.
Ahrefs offers a free version with which you can download ten Backlinks and monitor two domains per request. If you're willing to pay €82 per month, you'll get a comprehensive analysis of your backlink profile, including image and domain analysis.Backlinks, dofollow/nofollow, Anchor text etc. This information can be invaluable as it gives you insight into the anchor text ratio on your site.
The Ahrefs Information Universe not only helps you with your link building activities. It also shows lost Backlinks and new Backlinks to your page. This makes it easier to keep track, so you don't have to guess. The AhrefsDashboard also displays suspicious links that you disavowto avoid being penalized.
Backlink Tool from Semrush
In Semrush you will find the Backlink Analysis Tool, a powerful tool to get functional data about Backlinks from any domain. With its huge database of 26.5 trillion Backlinks offers Semrush many insightful diagrams that show new and lost Backlinks, the authority rank of all links, the development of backlink generation processes and much more.
With the backlink audit tool you can check your Search Console-integrate data. You can also integrate toxic Backlinks and send them to Google's Disavow tool to keep your backlink profile clean thanks to automatic and regular tracking.
Besides backlink analysis offers Semrush a whole range of SEO tools that you can use free of charge and for an unlimited period of time, albeit with limited functionality. These include Keyword-Research, monetization analysis, Traffic-Analysis, SERP-position tracking, CPC mapping and much more.
Backlink Tool from Moz
Moz Pro is a complete package of professional SEO tools in which Moz Link Explorer is one of the most important tools. It is particularly useful for Backlinks of your competitors. To see how it works, all you have to do is search for a competitor's domain or a specific URL and Moz will show you all the Backlinks . For each backlink, you can display a number of key figures, e.g. a domain authority index, the number of linking domains, a spam score and a list of top links.
Prices range from €99 to €599 per month, depending on how many functions and how "professional" you want your SEO activities to be.
One of the outstanding features of Link Explorer is the anchor text analysis, which shows the most common anchor texts in a website's backlink profile. Many wonder what this tool is good for, and the answer is that it helps to identify black hat linking techniques: If there are a lot of exact match anchor texts, that could be a sign Big G is trying to target you in an unsavory way backlinks to provide.
Moz's database is not as large as Ahrefs', but the subscription fee includes Link Explorer and a few other tools that may be worthwhile.
Backlink Tool from Majestic
Majestic SEO offers this tool as a Chrome app and brings backlink analysis right into your Browser. It is a quick way to check the strength of a page based on its backlink information. The Trust Flow and Citation Flow values appear immediately in the URL-bar for each page you visit, along with summary information about URLs and domains that link to the page.
Although you can sign up for a paid subscription to get all the features, the Chrome app offers some tools for free. These include link profile charts and link counts on URL-, Subdomain- and root level. Subscribers receive further details about the links, including lists of the ten strongest Backlinks and the ten strongest anchor texts. This makes it easier for you to get straight into the backlink analysis and gives you a quick overview.
Backlink Tool from SEO Spyglass
Recently, a new competitor has entered the SEO arena, and the frontrunners should pay attention to it.
SEO Spyglass is part of the SEO PowerSuitea series of tools that have received many positive reviews. Unlike most backlink tools, this is an application that you install on your computer, whether it's a Mac, Windows or Linux machine. You can use the basic features for free for as long as you want, or you can pay €299 per year for a professional license that offers unlimited backlink monitoring, task scheduling and basic reporting features, for example, or €699 per year for an enterprise license that unlocks the full feature set of PowerSuite.
SEO Spyglass claims to have the largest link database of all known tools. You can also add your own links by importing them directly from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The tool identifies potentially harmful links to avoid being penalized by Penguin. It calculates the risks of a penalty and takes into account the same factors that Google uses. If it finds a threat, you can neutralize it with a few clicks by using the exclusive SpyGlass disavow file generator - you don't have to worry about getting it right yourself.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a backlink checker that analyzes the data of the Google Webmaster tools to check the inbound links to your website or those of your competitors. The tool creates a detailed link analysis that includes the follow/nofollow attributes, index/no index, cached/not cached, domain authorityanchor text, social popularity, Alexa rank and much more. You can disavow links and create files to submit them directly to Google.
SE-Ranking offers three basic tariffs: Optimum €39 , Plus €89 and Enterprise €190. They differ in the number of websites checked and the number of monitored websites. Backlinks. You can receive discounts if you sign up for several months or reduce the frequency of checks: 20 % for a check every three days and 40 % if you agree to a weekly check; otherwise the check will be carried out daily.
Backlink Tool from Nightwatch
A backlink tool that measures the actual influence of your Backlinks on your SERP-rankings are analyzed. Through smart notifications, Nightwatch sends you regular updates on newly discovered and lost Backlinks. It uses its own crawlers in combination with several external tracking sources to provide accurate and up-to-date information on all Backlinks that could influence your rankings.
The visualization tools provide segmentation according to any parameter in order to visualize the effects of each Backlinks to understand. A backlink portfolio summarizes different segments that were acquired at different times. You can find out according to quality, domain, follow/no-follow attributes and spam status.
Nightwatch performs an automatic check of active and dead links to show you which links add value to your website and which reduce this value.
LinkMiner
A large database - bigger than Elon Musk's ambitions, according to LinkMiner.
If you enter your competitor's domain name, LinkMiner can recognize their strongest Backlinks and compare them with renowned metrics such as Citation Flow, Trust Evaluate flow and others. A simple visualization panel avoids the common problem of crowded Browser-Tabs: With just one click you get a preview of each referring website with highlighted anchor placement.
LinkMiner offers you the possibility with the Backlink Tool, Backlinks out of its total 9 trillionBacklinksdatabase or search only the most recent data to limit the search to 30-day-old links. The "Lost" option helps you to find deleted Backlinks and get the opportunity to replace your competitors. So that you can concentrate on the links that are really important, LinkMiner offers you the option of saving the best finds in a list. This way you can find the most important Backlinks and access them at any time.
Try yourself out
Most of the tools I have presented to you have a free version, check them out and decide which one you like best. There's no excuse not to pursue your link building strategy. The most important thing: just get started.