It's important to know how many backlinks are linking to your website, from what websites these links come from and what value they bring to your site. The incoming links to pages within your website can determine several factors of those pages, including search engine rankings, PageRank and, of course, visitor traffic.
How many links and the value of these links are relative to the search engines that find them. In other words, Google may have a different amount of backlinks indexed for your website than Bing does, and therefore rankings may also vary. In most cases, Google will be the first to identify valuable links, which you can then analyze using the methods below:
Find Backlinks from Search Engines
The way to do this is by typing in your URL in the search box of that particular search engine, prefixed with links:. So, to find links to a particular page, you would type something like this in the search bar: links://www.your-domain.com/blog-page.html, depending on what page you want find links on.
Incoming Links from Webmaster Tools
Another way to track and evaluate your incoming links is by using the Webmaster Tools software that every major search engine carries.
Google Webmaster Tools is almost mandatory, because not only is the Google Search Engine the most important one to know this information of, due to the owners of the PageRank algorithm, but also because it's more accurate than others. Another argument is that other search engines, such as Bing, copies Google data, which is why using only Google Webmaster tools should be sufficient.
Nonetheless, other webmaster tools include Yahoo Site Explorer by Yahoo, and Bing Webmaster Tools by Bing.
Other Backlink Check Tools
Now if this sounds a lot, you can always just check www.backlinkwatch.com, but don't be surprised if the backlink count is lower than you expected. It may take a while for the search engines to identify this which will than have to be indexed by backlinkwatch.com.
