backlinks
10 Free SEO Tools to Check Your Site and Backlinks
Nov
Using the right tools is always better, especially when you want to create something efficiently. It is the same when you build your SEO strategy.
Don’t misunderstand me, having the right SEO tools doesn't mean that your website will automatically rank higher on Google. To do so, you must have a good SEO strategy and implement it correctly.
However, using the right SEO tools can undoubtedly save you some time, be very effective, and in the long term help you you have notable results in terms of rankings.
We recently published a list of free SEO tools to search keywords.
Below is a list of top free SEO tools that enable you to check your website, as well as your links, including backlinks:
As a webmaster or a web marketer, you must use Google Webmaster Tools (yes you read correctly "must", not "should").
This free SEO tool enables you to quickly check crawl errors such as 404 pages and redirection problems, duplicate content issues, backlinks, and site indexation status including sitemap and crawl frequency.
Pingdom offers a free and effective SEO tool that helps you monitor your server, network and website.
For instance, Pingdom Tools can test the load time of a web page, DNS servers and settings for a domain name, and network connectivity to a server. Alerts can be enabled and sent via SMS and email.
As its name suggests, SEO Site Check up gives you a very complete and free analysis of your onsite SEO.
Plenty of elements are checked, including page statistics, site data, meta tags, page notes, objects, site security, and many more. The tool also helps you check your backlinks.
4. SEO Workers
SEO Workers is a free and very powerful SEO analysis tool that helps you analyze and measure the ranking potential of your web pages.
Not only does it audit and analyze the head elements such as title and meta description tags, and the keywords, it also offers you advice on what to correct on your website.
A Firefox SEO extension is also available for download (read more about SEO extensions for Firefox).
Gsite Crawler is a free program for Windows featuring a generator for Google sitemap files. It allows you to help Google index your web pages optimally.
The GSite Crawler enables you to generate an excellent Google sitemap file for your website. Having a relevant sitemap is crucial for SEO.
6. Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool
Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool is an online SEO tool that allows you to see how search engine robots see your website. Indeed, you can see your web pages in Lynx, a text-mode web browser.
In addition, Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool helps you check which of your web pages are accessible to the vision impaired. You can also download the full version of the tool to get better results.
Open Site Explorer is one of the most popular free SEO tools by SEOMoz. It offers a strong analysis of onpage signals such as HTML tags, outbound links and their respective authority, and many more.
The tool is really similar to Google Webmaster Tools but also features time evolution tracking. The SEOMoz Pro (premium version) offers more features. You can have a free trial.
SEO experts like Xenu. It detects problems on your website. For instance, Xenu checks your links (to see whether there are broken links), redirections issues, duplicate content (title, meta description, etc.), and loading time.
Another interesting feature offered by Xenu is the ability to know all pages that point to a given page. Very useful when you want to know all the links pointing to a deleted page.
Link Diagnosis is a very popular free SEO tool that checks your backlinks and their anchors. The Firefox Extension can be downloaded and enables you to benefit from many more additional features.
10. Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a very useful free SEO tool, notably for backlinks analysis. Their majestic site explorer gives you a summary of all referring domains and external backlinks.
Their backlink history tool allows you to determine the number of backlinks for your website and tracks their evolution over time. You can therefore easily control and manage your linkbuilding campaigns. More features are available in their premium plans.
Do you use any other free SEO tools you would like to share?
Twitter, SEO and China
Sep
If used appropriately Twitter can generate some seriously good traffic to your website, there are tons of posts about how to do this on the web. Have you tried searching for site:twitter.com in Google recently? You get 137 million search results.
Let's see the case of our favorite company, them.pro. In a Google search, our twitter account, twitter.com/seochina (search it), almost every tweet appears, and in the search: "SEO China" it gets the 14th position. We are getting backlinks not only to our website but to our tweets! Bottom line, "tweeting" works.

It is a cheap and easy way to generate traffic from anywhere in the world… but how about China? Just like Facebook and Youtube, Twitter is blocked in the whole country. Before it was blocked, Twitter was becoming a popular service in China and many Chinese were using it on daily basis. Now, similar (clone) services like jiwai.de and t.sina.com.cn are there to fill up the space Twitter left.
So can we still use Twitter? Of course! It is still possible to tweet in China without much hassle… we use ping.fm and our followers are still subscribing from in and out of China. The effort is not lost, our advice is, even in China, tweet, tweet, tweet…
Backlink Strategies : Choose yours
Jul
what is your backlink strategy? Popularizing a website is not always easy, but as long as search engines are using link or backlink based ranking techniques, the popularity and its metric (the backlinks) will remain a determining factor for the visibility of a website.
That's why as seo experts, building backlinks is a major domain to be skilled in the use. Let's have a quick state of the art.
What are the backlink strategies?
We can distinguish 3 different types of strategies:
- Ninja link
- Link baiting
- Social Media Optimization
Ninja Link
Historically, the ninja link is the oldest netlinking strategy. The work of a ninja is long, accurate and laborious. This kind of backlink building consist of self deploy links. To do this, you should know where it is possible to get backlinks, have your own network of sites but also contact other webmasters and negotiate establishment of links.
You may also spend time to promote your website within "user-generated content" spaces like comments, wikis or forums (especially that we definitely know now that "nofollow" instructions are not taken in consideration by google bots any more). But it is an irksome work with no guaranteed result. Because of moderation policy, your links could be deleted. Put your putting your backlink with original and relevant remark increases your chances.
Also be careful not to apply this technique too often, otherwise you could be marked as spam linking by search engines.
Let's see what are the benefits of this strategy:
- You may obtain links to old pages
- These are links to the page of your choice even deep pages
- Possibility to choose the anchor links
- You completely control the selection of sites and pages where the backlinks are set
A ninja is able to act on different criterias affecting the quality of a backlink. These advantages make this backlink strategy the most powerful.
However, the cost may be very important and the deployment is quite long.
Link Baiting
The Link Baiting is the technique recommended by Google for acquiring popularity. Since it is long and difficult to get backlinks, it is better to let others do it for you : bait them ! If you're wondering how, know that it is here the complexity of this technique. In fact, you have to inspire people to talk about your site on their own websites.
The basic principle is to offer original and high quality content.
Here are some ideas for attracting people :
- Establish rankings (this kind of blog posts can generate many links and traffic)
- Write original articles
- Offering a unique and innovative service
- Post a photo or video that you made yourself
- Organize a game or competition
- Write polemics articles
- Write humour articles
- Synthesize a content: lists are often very popular, internet users talk about on their blog and easily bookmark synthesis (think that bookmark tools are more and more often online, so again it creates backlinks)
- Translate reference articles
etc...
Social Media Optimization
Social media are increasingly taking part of our daily lives, how many times you go on Facebook a week ? (before facebook was blocked in china i mean!)
Traffic through a campaign of Social Media Optimization is becoming increasingly significant. In addition, such a campaign can generate traffic as well as backlinks. The result for such a strategy can be incredible, both in the us and china.
- The first step is to have at least one account on most platforms: social bookmark services, video, photo, powerpoint, resume.
- The second step is to develop your network and make connections. You can count on your "friends" to support your buzz.
- The third step is to share and make noise. Learning to use the various services that can provide visibility ( RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, comments, ratings ...)
here we go, with the backlink strategies, now, what is yours?
Google and javascript, new honeymoon
Jun
Yes, google can understand some of the javascript links, and will soon be able to understand more. They just said so at the googe I/O gathering.
What does it mean?
It means that for years, we seo experts, were telling you “NO, DON’T, Please take out that ugly javascript link that google doesn’t understand”
Now we will tell you “no, don’t, please take out that ugly javascript link that still many search engines don’t understand, even if google understand it now”.
Baidu doesn’t, yahoo doesn’t, and we don’t know yet about bing (the new Microsoft search engine), but there are big chances that it doesn’t. So, yes, continue not to use javascript links whenever you can, and always prefer the old html link tag <a href=”” title=””> </a>
What are the javascript links google can understand?
google can understand these javascript links :
- <div onclick="document.location.href='http://gotothispage.com/'">
- <div onclick="myfunctionname('gotothispage.html')"><a href="#" onclick="myfunctionname()">that's a cool page dude</a>
- <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="window.open ('youcometothispage.html')">please open this page</a>
so yes you can use them, but please, avoid them when not necessary...
5 Ways Google Knows your Backlinks are Bullshit
Apr
Let’s think as a search engine.
Let’s think as a search engine.
1) Do you use analytics on all your websites with the same google account? Then google knows all these sites are more or less yours.















