1/ Checking backlinks (also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links – basically they’re pages that link to your website/page)

Use a Google Advanced Search: for example http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_lq=google.com&btnG=Search

The basic idea here is to see what websites link to your website. Google (and other Search Engines) use both the number of links and the weight of the website linking to you. I.e the more popular the site that links to you, the more ‘weight’ it adds to your website, the more ‘weight’ your website has the higher up the search ranking your site will be. There are even more complicated factors involved in this algorithm but it’s probably too in depth for this brief guide.

2/ Assuming you have some websites/pages that link to your website it’s a good idea to analyse them for quality. Ideally you want links from reputable websites with a good amount of visitors, this ensures that some of there kudos ‘rubs’ off on you when they link to you.

I’ll continue this subject in another post as I want to cover keyword usage, link formatting and optimising websites…