Inbound Links and Tools Helpful for Link Research

Inbound Links are very important when wanting people to visit and find your local business website when they’re surfing the net. These links are located on other sites throughout the Internet allowing people to click on them and then be directed to your site. Inbound links can be a great way to boost lead and sales conversions for your local business.
You always want to find out as much as you can about any links your local business site has directing others to it. In some cases, you may have placed these links outside of your website, and in many cases, others will have done it for you. Learning more about all of them allows you to decide whether or not you should focus on having deep links texts which have specific anchor text, or having more links that help build your local business’s site authority, so it ranks higher and appears higher in search engines.
There are tools available online that can help you with link research, such as:

• Open Site Explorer - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
• Bing Webmaster-http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
• HubSpot- http://www.hubspot.com/products/

Open Site Explorer is a search engine for links. It allows you to see what links are pointing to your sites. Using this allows you to see who is currently linking to you, research competitors, discover links to broken pages allowing you to go into that page and fix it. Any local business can use this to learn who out there is linking to them.
Yahoo! Site Explorer has merged with Bing Webmaster. Now you can use Bing Webmaster while getting all the benefits that Yahoo! Site Explorer had on its own, plus more. With Bing Webmaster, you’re able to see traffic stats, index coverage, and so on. Plus, you’re able to see who’s linking to your local business webpage.
Thanks to HubSpot, The HubSpot Inbound Marketing software is available. It has many features as well as something known as a Page Grader. According to HubSpot, Page Grade tracks the following metrics for every page on your site:

• Page Title
• Number of Ranked Keywords
• Visits
• Inbound links
• Internal links
• PageGrade

Per Hubspot, this list of key metrics is provided by The Page Grader dashboard. The results are shown by page which allows for easy prioritization of what pages you should optimize first.
Each of these has their own beneficial aspects.
Again, it’s wise for any local business to know about any inbound links. At one point they were used only as a source for referral traffic, but today they are influential for your search engine ranking also. Through each link, there are a couple main benefits, as shared by Rob Ousbey of Distilled in the HubSpot eBook ‘Learning SEO from the Experts: A Step-By-Step Guide’:

1. Increased authority of the site as an entirety, and Better SEO authority of the specific linked-to page
2. An increase in relevancy of the page for those keywords used in the anchor text of the link.
Keep all of this in mind as you research and include inbound links for your local business.