What is the most important aspect of website optimization after good content and well placed Meta Tags?

According to Google- High Quality linking is a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithms. In fact, Google has dedicated a fair number of posts in its blog to educate us about the importance of having good quality backlinks.

Just Imagine having great- Interesting and relevant content on your website and not ranking anywhere near the top 10 search results. Ouch!!!!! Its time you check the number of backlinks to your website and assess their quality.

20 Free Backlink Checker Tools / Link Popularity check Tools:

• Webmaster Toolkit: The Link Popularity Checker tells you how many websites are linking to yours. You should try different methods of inputting your URL, as some search engines treat them differently. Different methods will probably produce slightly different results.

• Submit Express: How popular is your website? This tool will show you how many other sites are linking to you. Most search engines use this data to calculate how popular your website is.

• Link Popularity.com: Knowing who links to your site and increasing the number of quality links is an important part of any web site promotion effort. This free service allows you to query Google,  Yahoo, and MSN and reports on link popularity.

• SEO Centro: The Link Popularity analysis program will search Google, Yahoo, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, and MSN to determine how many pages are linking to your web page.

• Add pro: Use this free tool to check the number of web pages linking to your site. You can also use it to find out how many links your competitors have and who’s linking to them. Some of the websites that are linking to your competitors could also be linking to you, if you let them know you exists.

• SEO Chat: This tool will query all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) when you enter the “link:” operator with your chosen URL. It will return the total link count for each URL.

• Add me: To find out how popular your site is, just enter your URL in the box below and press the “Check Popularity” button. If your site represents a business, don’t forget to also check your competitors backlinks as well! You might be surprised by the results.

• SEO Guy: Just type in www.domain.com in the “Your URL” Field and hit “GO” also if you want to see how you stack up against your competition feel free to place up to 3 competitors URL’s in there to compare.

• Free Web Submission: Their Link Popularity script checks links to your website on 3 major search engines.

• SELF Seo: With this tool you can check the link popularity for any given page – just enter the URL in the box below. You will see how many links has been already “noticed” by the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and Alltheweb & Hotbot.

• Go Rank Tool: This link popularity tool will detect up to the first 30 links currently present in Google as backlinks for the URL you enter. This tool then analyzes the contents of each of these pages for the specific link text to the URL you selected. The text of each link is displayed in the final report as well as the title of each linking page.

• Google Backlink Checker tool: Google Back link Checker tool enables you to know the number of websites who have given a link to your website or web page.Back links are inward links to a website or a webpage; it acts as one of the key factors in determining the ranking of your website. It helps you to have a track of the other websites on the web that link to your URL.

• Yahoo Backlink Checker Tool: A back link is an inward link to your site that may or may not be reciprocated with an outward link back. If page A links to page B then a back link would be a link which goes from page B back to page A.

• MSN Backlink Checker Tool: Our tool for checking your back links tells you how many websites are linking to yours. Website popularity is an important factor in your search engine ranking. The more popular your site is, the better it will be ranked on the search engines.

• Link Popularity Checking Tool: Tells you the number of backlinks for AltaVista & All the web.

• Link Popularity Comparison Tool: This Link Popularity Comparison Tool allows you to quickly and easily compare your link popularity scores to competitor’s websites. Enter the URL of the sites to be compared on the blank fields. Click COMPARE to know the results of comparison. The results show up the comparison of the link popularity of the website with the other one. The comparison can be done with more than one website i.e. up to three websites can be compared.

• Web Confs Backlink Summary Tool: This tool will give you a summary of your competitor’s backlinks.

• Multiple Datacenter Backlink Checker Tool: Their Multiple Datacenter Backlink Checker Tool helps you determine the backlinks of your site with various Google Datacenters.

• Link Popularity Romov: Measure the link popularity by checking its Google Page Rank, search engine backlinks, Alexa traffic rank, as well as its popularity on major social networking web sites.

• Free Link Popularity Checker Tool: Link Popularity Check offers free, instant, online reports of a webpage’s link popularity rating in 3 top search engines; Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing (MSN).