Backlinks are an important part of any website’s SEO. How you can gauge where your competition is getting their links from as well as how you might be able to get them too is a critical part of the seo process. Here’s a list of 30 free backlink tools that will analyze a given website or domain and tell you who’s linking to them. Some of these tools take it a step further and will tell you the domain PR, the PR of the specific linking page, anchor tags and more!

Each of these is different so i’d suggest you try a few until you find one that works best for your own needs. Personally I don’t know what I would do without the Link Checker hosted by Australia-based SEOPro, but to each their own.

30 FREE Link Building Tools:

• Yoast (http://yoast.com/tools/seo/link-analysis/)
• Seochat (http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/link-popularity/)
• Seologs (http://www.seologs.com/link-analysis-tool/backlinks.html)
• Seomoz (http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape)
• Seopro (http://seopro.com.au/free-seo-tools/link-checker/)
• Smartpagerank (http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php)
• Submitexpress (http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop/)
• Webmasterlogs (http://www.webmasterlogs.com/link-analysis-tool/backlinks.html)
• Webmaster-toolkit (http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml)
• Yahoo (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
• Addme (http://www.addme.com/popularity.htm)
• Analyzebacklinks (http://www.analyzebacklinks.com/)
• Backlinks4me (http://www.backlinks4me.com/)
• Backlinksseo (http://www.backlinksseo.com/blfinder.php)
• Backlinkwatch (http://www.backlinkwatch.com/)
• Build-reciprocal-link (http://www.build-reciprocal-links.com/backlink_checker_tool.html)
• Digitalpoint (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/)
• Domain-pop (http://www.domain-pop.com/)
• Ekstreme (http://ekstreme.com/backlink-analyzer)
• iWebtool (http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker)
• Linkdiagnosis (http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/)
• LinkVoodoo (http://www.linkvoodoo.com/)
• Majesticseo (http://www.majesticseo.com/)
• Marketleap (http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm)
• Online-utility (http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp)
• Ranks (http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html)
• Searchbliss (http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/back-links-finder.asp)
• Searchenginegenie (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-checker.html)
• Seobook (http://tools.seobook.com/link-harvester/)
• Seocentro (http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/link-popularity.html)

enjoy!

Here’s a giant list of updated social bookmarking sites that you can post your links on to get backlinks and improve your SERP. They’re listed in order by pagerank as of June ’09.

Someone recently asked for a way to quickly pull basic page info from a website, so I thought I’d go ahead and share the code for a very easy PHP script that will retrieve the page title, meta keywords and meta description for any website.

<?php
$url = “http://www.shamwow.com";
$fp = fopen( $url, ‘r’ );
$content = “”;

while( !feof( $fp ) ) {
$buffer = trim( fgets( $fp, 4096 ) );
$content .= $buffer;
}

$start = ‘<title>’;
$end = ‘<\/title>’;

preg_match( “/$start(.*)$end/s”, $content, $match );
$title = $match[ 1 ];
$metatagarray = get_meta_tags( $url );
$keywords = $metatagarray[ "keywords" ];
$description = $metatagarray[ "description" ];  

echo “<div><strong>URL:</strong> $url</div>\n”;
echo “<div><strong>Title:</strong> $title</div>\n”;
echo “<div><strong>Description:</strong> $description</div>\n”;
echo “<div><strong>Keywords:</strong> $keywords</div>\n”;
?>

There’s your basic script. Replace where it says www.shamwow.com with whatever site you want to pull data from. The results will look like this:

URL: http://www.shamwow.com
Title: ShamWow® Official Website РHolds 12 Times Its Weight In Liquid
Description: You’ll Be Saying Wow Every Time!
Keywords:You’ll Be Saying Wow Every Time!, official tv website, as seen on tv

Where to go from here? There are millions of different uses from SERP reporting to page title & keyword comparison. Heck, you could even throw a form on it and present it as an SEO tool on your website (almost every ‘toolset’ you find online has something similar)….