How to Find Quality Incoming Linksnumber of quality incoming links.

One of the most important criteria for search engines to find your site is the number of quality incoming links. We know that incoming links are essential to your SEO campaign, but often it is hard to know exactly which links to go after. If you’re just trying to build links in the dark, you’re going to waste an awful lot of time and energy for not a lot of return. 

Our Favorite Link Building Tools

Moz offers a tool called Link Explorer that searches a vast link index to discover backlinks to your site. Link Explorer is part of Moz’s Pro series of tools. The goal of this tool is to help you find all of the really great links that are driving traffic to your competition.

Here’s what the results look like:

moz link explorer results.

Another useful backlink research tool is Ahref’s Site Explorer. This easy-to-use platform offers this backlink research tool as a way to get a comprehensive list of backlinks pointing to any website. Smart SEOs will leverage this tool to find link opportunities available based on competitor or industry partner backlinks profiles. 

Now I Have the Info, Now What?

With this competitive research in hand, you can really start to understand why a site outranks you. Remember, the formula for ranking higher than your competition is to beat them in:

  1. Indexed pages
  2. Incoming links
  3. Incoming links with the anchor text matching the keyword you want to rank for
  4. Site age
  5. Domain PageRank
  6. Page optimization

Now you can have an exact roadmap to which incoming links are necessary to rank higher.

Why are These Tools Better Than Others?

Here are a couple really useful features of the tools:

  1. Ignore NoFollow Links: The tool lets you ignore all of the nofollow links, so you only see which sites are linking directly to competitors.
  2. Ranked by Importance: Moz constantly refines their metrics. The results are a really good estimate of the most important and valuable links. Both tools allow you to sort by metrics that matter to you.
  3. Finds the Important Hubs: One important model of SEO traffic is finding the “Hubs” or important pointing sites that drive a huge amount of traffic. These tools are great at locating hubs.
  4. Keep Track of New Links and Competitors: View hundreds, and even thousands of link sources and new competitor sites as they move up the ranks.
  5. Compare Your Site to Any Similar Site: It’s important to find all potential competitors, not just direct competition. You’re limited only by your imagination.

Comprehensive SEO Strategies

Mad Fish Digital has over 15 years of industry expertise in search engine performance and can help you increase your website’s visibility and drive measurable results. Contact us to learn more about what we do.