Inbound Links 101: How to Find Who is Linking to Your Website

If you want to get more visitors to your website (and who doesn’t) while improving your chances of snagging a Top 10 search engine listing on the top search engines then you really need to pay attention to how many websites are linking to your website.  Websites that link to your website are known as inbound links or in-links. 

It makes sense that having more websites linking to your site will likely increase traffic to your website.  Besides that, major search engines like Google appear to be placing more and more importance on the number of in-links your site has.  This is now part of the formula that determines exactly where your site stands in search engine results.  They also are paying more attention to the “quality” of sites linking to your site but we will cover that a bit later.

Determine Your Location Before Your Destination

Before you begin developing a plan to get more sites to link to you, you need to first figure out how many sites are already linking to you.  This is easy enough.  All of the major search engines provide this information with a simple, little known command.  To find out how many sites are linking to you just go to one of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL and type the following into the search field:

Link: yoursite.com

Be sure to replace “yoursite.com” with the name of your website.  For example, to check the sites linking to MarketingGrade.com I would type link: MarketingGrade.com.

The results you see should all be sites linking to your site.  You can also add “www.” In front of your domain name to find out if a different number of sites are linking to www.yoursite.com as opposed to yoursite.com. 

Simplify Your Search

A great resource that will save you some time doing all of this is the free link popularity tool on www.MarketLeap.com.  Market Leap will check the number of sites linking to your site and give you other sites in your industry along with the number of sites linking to them.

Market Leap will also let you know how your site compares overall to other sites and then gives you a rating like Limited Presence, Above Average Presence or 900 Lb. Gorilla.  Once you have searched for your site in Market Leap it will save your results so that you can track your progress over time.

Are Your In-Links High Quality?

Google has a rating system called Page Rank or PR.  It is a scale that measures the “quality” of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being the worst and 10 being the best.  The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites.  So in other words, it’s better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR linking to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR.

A simple way to see the Page Rank of any site you visit is to download the Google toolbar at toolbar.google.com.  It displays the Page Rank of the site you are visiting at the top of your browser.

Now you can get a realistic look at how effective your link building has been.  So get out there and start getting some in-links. 

Ryan Azevedo is the founder of MarketingGrade.com a leading resource for simple, step-by-step strategies and solutions to help people make more money with their new or existing websites without spending a lot of money. How is does your marketing rate? Get a FREE Marketing Grade for your website at www.MarketingGrade.com.