Day: June 3, 2020

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Randy Duermyer is a former writer for The Balance Small Business and a home-based business owner with experience in digital marketing.

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Randy Duermyer

Updated April 02, 2019

Without a doubt, search engines are the most used online tools for finding information and resources. So it goes without saying that having your website listed can do a lot in helping you market your home business. Here’s what you need to know about the ways in which search engines can be used to promote your business.

When you think of search engines in terms of marketing, you might focus on SEO or search engine optimization. However, that’s not the only way search engines can help your business.

Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing or advertising your website through search engines, like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Search engine marketing (SEM) may consist of one or more of the following components:

• Organic search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization involves using techniques to help search engines find and rank your website in organic search results. Organic search results are the rankings of web pages returned by a search engine when you search for a specific word (keyword) or phrase (keyword phrase).
• Local search: If your business caters to people who live or work in your area, you can get listed by city in search engines (e.g. Google) and directories (e.g. Yahoo). This offers a way for area residents to find your business online, which is ideal since many people don’t use the phonebook anymore.
• Pay per click advertising (PPC): While SEO is free, pay-per-click ads are just as they sound; ads you run on a search engine that you pay for each time someone clicks on it. In PPC advertising, you bid the amount you are willing to pay per click. In general, the more you bid, the higher your ad will likely appear in the search engine results. Google AdWords ​has implemented an additional factor in which your ads are ranked based on the relevancy or importance that Google places on your site, which is very difficult to manipulate. You can also use pay per click advertising to your advantage on your own site. For example, you can make money with Google AdSense and other similar programs.

You may or may not decide to make search engine marketing part of your marketing and advertising strategy. If you don’t have a website for your business and don’t plan to ever have one, you certainly wouldn’t need search engine marketing. However, in today’s business climate, nearly all businesses are expected to have a website. In fact, since most people go online to find information, even about their local businesses, not having a website can hurt your chances of being found. Since having a website is crucial to success, there’s no reason not to take advantage of what search engines offer to help you get found.

Search engine marketing can help deliver traffic to your website, which in turn can lead to new customers and clients, and increased home business revenues. Compared to other means of marketing and advertising, search engine marketing can be very cost effective. For example, it costs nothing to use search engine optimization techniques if you do them yourself. Organic search rankings are free, so if you can help search engines find and rank your business, your traffic should increase

Similarly, Pay Per Click Advertising can be very inexpensive, as long as you do it right. You can set limits on how much you pay per click and how much you pay per day, which allows you control costs. The trick to success in PPC advertising is making sure you write a great ad that targets your market.

How you measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing program depends on what your objectives are. If your intent is to increase the number of visitors to your website, you determine if your SEM campaigns are successful by comparing your web traffic statistics before and after you implemented search engine marketing.

For search engine marketing, efforts may take time before you see any significant boost to your traffic. There are many factors to SEO, including the keywords you’re hoping to rank for, how well you utilize them, without overdoing it, on your website, as well as how long your website has been online and the quality of backlinks (other websites that link to yours).

Although you can instantly get your PPC ads running, it can take some time for them to appear against other ads, depending on your per-click pay bid and other factors.

In addition to measuring your website traffic, you need to track your conversion rates. For example, if, as a result of your search engine marketing efforts, your traffic doubles from 250 to 500 visitors per month, how many new customers did you acquire from the additional 250 visitors to your site? Do you now have twice as many customers as you did before? If you picked up five customers your conversion rate would be 2 percent of the new traffic (5 divided by 250) and 1 percent (5 of 500) overall. You’ll spend a lot of time marketing, so you want to make sure your efforts are paying off.

Ultimately, when measuring the success of SEM marketing, it isn’t just about increasing traffic to your website but also having that traffic lead to greater sales. So your goal is to find ways to increase the number of visitors and their conversion rates, so you’ll know exactly what it takes to make your search engine marketing program successful.

Although you don’t want to ignore search engines in your marketing plan, you don’t want to rely on them solely for website traffic. Search engine marketing is just one of the many marketing options available to home businesses.

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Lesson 19: Basic Troubleshooting Techniques

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Troubleshooting

Do you know what to do if your screen goes blank? What if you can’t seem to close an application, or can’t hear any sound from your speakers? Whenever you have a problem with your computer, don’t panic! There are many basic troubleshooting techniques you can use to fix issues like this. In this lesson, we’ll show you some simple things to try when troubleshooting, as well as how to solve common problems you may encounter.

General tips to keep in mind

There are many different things that could cause a problem with your computer. No matter what’s causing the issue, troubleshooting will always be a process of trial and error—in some cases, you may need to use several different approaches before you can find a solution; other problems may be easy to fix. We recommend starting by using the following tips.

• Write down your steps: Once you start troubleshooting, you may want to write down each step you take. This way, you’ll be able to remember exactly what you’ve done and can avoid repeating the same mistakes. If you end up asking other people for help, it will be much easier if they know exactly what you’ve tried already.
• Take notes about error messages: If your computer gives you an error message, be sure to write down as much information as possible. You may be able to use this information later to find out if other people are having the same error.
• Always check the cables: If you’re having trouble with a specific piece of computer hardware, such as your monitor or keyboard, an easy first step is to check all related cables to make sure they’re properly connected.
• Restart the computer: When all else fails, restarting the computer is a good thing to try. This can solve a lot of basic issues you may experience with your computer.

Using the process of elimination

If you’re having an issue with your computer, you may be able to find out what’s wrong using the process of elimination. This means you’ll make a list of things that could be causing the problem and then test them out one by one to eliminate them. Once you’ve identified the source of your computer issue, it will be easier to find a solution.

Scenario:

Let’s say you’re trying to print out invitations for a birthday party, but the printer won’t print. You have some ideas about what could be causing this, so you go through them one by one to see if you can eliminate any possible causes.

First, you check the printer to see that it’s turned on and plugged in to the surge protector. It is, so that’s not the issue. Next, you check to make sure the printer’s ink cartridge still has ink and that there is paper loaded in the paper tray. Things look good in both cases, so you know the issue has nothing to do with ink or paper.

Now you want to make sure the printer and computer are communicating correctly. If you recently downloaded an update to your operating system, it might interfere with the printer. But you know there haven’t been any recent updates and the printer was working yesterday, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.

You check the printer’s USB cord and find that it’s not plugged in. You must have unplugged it accidentally when you plugged something else into the computer earlier. Once you plug in the USB cord, the printer starts working again. It looks like this printer issue is solved!

This is just one example of an issue you might encounter while using a computer. In the rest of this lesson, we’ll talk about other common computer problems and some ways to solve them.

Simple solutions to common problems

Most of the time, problems can be fixed using simple troubleshooting techniques, like closing and reopening the program. It’s important to try these simple solutions before resorting to more extreme measures. If the problem still isn’t fixed, you can try other troubleshooting techniques.

Problem: Power button will not start computer

• Solution 1: If your computer does not start, begin by checking the power cord to confirm that it is plugged securely into the back of the computer case and the power outlet.
• Solution 2: If it is plugged into an outlet, make sure it is a working outlet. To check your outlet, you can plug in another electrical device, such as a lamp.
• Solution 3: If the computer is plugged in to a surge protector, verify that it is turned on. You may have to reset the surge protector by turning it off and then back on. You can also plug a lamp or other device into the surge protector to verify that it’s working correctly.
• Solution 4: If you are using a laptop, the battery may not be charged. Plug the AC adapter into the wall, then try to turn on the laptop. If it still doesn’t start up, you may need to wait a few minutes and try again.

Problem: An application is running slowly

• Solution 1: Close and reopen the application.
• Solution 2: Update the application. To do this, click the Help menu and look for an option to check for Updates. If you don’t find this option, another idea is to run an online search for application updates.

Problem: An application is frozen

Sometimes an application may become stuck, or frozen. When this happens, you won’t be able to close the window or click any buttons within the application.

• Solution 1: Force quit the application. On a PC, you can press (and hold) Ctrl+Alt+Delete (the Control, Alt, and Delete keys) on your keyboard to open the Task Manager. On a Mac, press and hold Command+Option+Esc. You can then select the unresponsive application and click End task (or Force Quit on a Mac) to close it.
• Solution 2: Restart the computer. If you are unable to force quit an application, restarting your computer will close all open apps.

Problem: All programs on the computer run slowly

• Solution 1: Run a virus scanner. You may have malware running in the background that is slowing things down.
• Solution 2: Your computer may be running out of hard drive space. Try deleting any files or programs you don’t need.
• Solution 3: If you’re using a PC, you can run Disk Defragmenter. To learn more about Disk Defragmenter, check out our lesson on Protecting Your Computer.

Problem: The computer is frozen

Sometimes your computer may become completely unresponsive, or frozen. When this happens, you won’t be able to click anywhere on the screen, open or close applications, or access shut-down options.

• Solution 1 (Windows only): Restart Windows Explorer. To do this, press and hold Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your keyboard to open the Task Manager. Next, locate and select Windows Explorer from the Processes tab and click Restart. You may need to click More Details at the bottom of the window to see the Processes tab.
• Solution 2 (Mac only): Restart Finder. To do this, press and hold Command+Option+Esc on your keyboard to open the Force Quit Applications dialog box. Next, locate and select Finder, then click Relaunch.
• Solution 3: Press and hold the Power but
  ton. The Power button is usually located on the front or side of the computer, typically indicated by the power symbol. Press and hold the Power button for 5 to 10 seconds to force the computer to shut down.
• Solution 4: If the computer still won’t shut down, you can unplug the power cable from the electrical outlet. If you’re using a laptop, you may be able to remove the battery to force the computer to turn off. Note: This solution should be your last resort after trying the other suggestions above.

Problem: The mouse or keyboard has stopped working

• Solution 1: If you’re using a wired mouse or keyboard, make sure it’s correctly plugged into the computer.
• Solution 2: If you’re using a wireless mouse or keyboard, make sure it’s turned on and that its batteries are charged.

Problem: The sound isn’t working

• Solution 1: Check the volume level. Click the audio button in the top-right or bottom-right corner of the screen to make sure the sound is turned on and that the volume is up.
• Solution 2: Check the audio player controls. Many audio and video players will have their own separate audio controls. Make sure the sound is turned on and that the volume is turned up in the player.
• Solution 3: Check the cables. Make sure external speakers are plugged in, turned on, and connected to the correct audio port or a USB port. If your computer has color-coded ports, the audio output port will usually be green.
• Solution 4: Connect headphones to the computer to find out if you can hear sound through the headphones.

Problem: The screen is blank

• Solution 1: The computer may be in Sleep mode. Click the mouse or press any key on the keyboard to wake it.
• Solution 2: Make sure the monitor is plugged in and turned on.
• Solution 3: Make sure the computer is plugged in and turned on.
• Solution 4: If you’re using a desktop, make sure the monitor cable is properly connected to the computer tower and the monitor.

Solving more difficult problems

If you still haven’t found a solution to your problem, you may need to ask someone else for help. As an easy starting point, we’d recommend searching the Web. It’s possible that other users have had similar problems, and solutions to these problems are often posted online. Also, if you have a friend or family member who knows a lot about computers, they may be able to help you.

Keep in mind that most computer problems have simple solutions, although it may take some time to find them. For difficult problems, a more drastic solution may be required, like reformatting your hard drive or reinstalling your operating system. If you think you might need a solution like this, we recommend consulting a professional first. If you’re not a computer expert, it’s possible that attempting these solutions could make the situation worse.

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A managed service provider (MSP) is a company that remotely manages a customer’s IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems, typically on a proactive basis and under a subscription model. Today, the terms “cloud service provider” and “managed service provider” are sometimes used as synonyms when the provider’s service is supported by a service level agreement (SLA) and is delivered over the internet.

The evolution of MSPs began in the 1990s with the emergence of application service providers (ASPs), which offered remote application hosting services. ASPs helped pave the way for cloud computing and companies that would provide remote support for customers’ IT infrastructure. MSPs, for the most part, initially focused on the remote management and monitoring (RMM) of servers and networks. Over time, MSPs have expanded the scope of their services in a bid to differentiate themselves from other providers.

While some MSPs may specialize in specific segments of information technology such as data storage, others may focus on specific vertical markets, such as legal, financial services, healthcare and manufacturing. Managed security services providers (MSSPs), for instance, offer specialized services such as remote firewall administration and other security-as-a-service offerings. Managed print services (MPS) providers, meanwhile, offload the task of maintaining printers and supplying consumables.

Pricing model for managed service providers

In per-device pricing, the MSP charges the customer a flat fee for each device under management. In per-user pricing, meanwhile, the MSP charges a flat fee for each user, accommodating users who use multiple devices. In all-inclusive pricing, also referred to as the all-you-can-eat model, the MSP charges a flat fee for all the IT infrastructure support and management services the MSP plans to offer.

In each of those pricing approaches, the customer pays the flat fee on a regularly scheduled basis, often monthly. Such pricing methods let MSPs sell services under a subscription model. This approach provides the MSP with a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) stream, in contrast to IT projects that tend to be one-time transactions.

MRR is one aspect of managed services work that differs from other business models in the IT solutions provider and channel partner space. Solutions providers pursuing the break/fix model, for example, usually price their services on a time and materials (T&M) basis, billing an hourly rate for repairing a customer’s IT equipment and charging for parts or replacement gear.

Companies performing IT project work, such as computer systems installation and integration, may charge a fixed price for products and services. Either way, those solutions providers generate revenue on a one-time basis from each project. An exception would be large projects with multiple milestones and associated payments. But, in general, the conventional solutions provider business is mainly transactional. An MSP’s recurring revenue stream, on the other hand, potentially provides a more stable and predictable base of business.

Service-level agreements

An MSP often provides its service offering under a service-level agreement, a contractual arrangement between the MSP and its customer that spells out the performance and quality metrics that will govern the relationship.

An SLA may be linked to an MSP’s pricing formula. For example, an MSP may offer a range of SLAs to customers, with the customer paying a higher fee for higher levels of service in a tiered pricing structure.

Challenges of managed service providers

Regardless of pricing model, a key challenge for MSP business management is to set pricing low enough to entice customers to buy their services but high enough to maintain an adequate profit margin.

In addition to pricing, MSPs pay close attention to operating costs and the cost of maintaining skilled employees. Labor is typically an MSP’s greatest expense. To keep labor costs in check and improve efficiency, most MSPs employ remote monitoring and management (RMM) software to keep tabs on clients’ IT functions. RMM software lets MSPs remotely troubleshoot and remediate issues with servers and endpoint devices. With RMM, MSPs can manage numerous customers’ IT systems simultaneously. MSPs may also use automated scripts to handle routine systems administration functions, such as checking hard disks for errors, without human intervention.

Another challenge MSPs face is the mainstream adoption of cloud computing. As more of their customers’ IT infrastructure components migrate to the cloud, MSPs have had to find ways to manage hybrid cloud environments. MSPs also seek to provide their own cloud computing services or resell other cloud providers’ capabilities, with cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (DR) a common entry point.

In addition, just becoming an MSP can prove challenging. The prospect of MRR has attracted many traditional solutions provider companies, such as VARs, to the MSP business model. However, would-be MSPs have struggled to establish themselves in the market. The MSP line of business calls for companies to adopt different performance metrics, technology infrastructure components and sales compensation programs, to name a few challenges. As a result, many MSPs derive revenue from business lines other than managed services, such as IT project work, break/fix business and on-site support. Pure-play MSPs are relatively rare in the IT services industry.

What MSPs are used for

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are typical MSP customers. Many smaller companies have limited in-house IT capabilities, so they may view an MSP’s service offering as a way to obtain IT expertise. Larger enterprises may also contract with MSPs, however. For example, government agencies, facing budget pressure and hiring limitations, may contract with an MSP to supplement in-house IT staff.

Small business use of MSP services

The MSP subscription model provides customers of all sizes the advantage of predictable IT support costs. And because MSPs take a proactive approach, they may be able to prevent IT problems from occurring and, therefore, from disrupting business operations.

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Whether you’re a business executive or a seasoned IT pro, using managed services can make your job easier. When effectively executed, a Managed Service (MS) is like gaining the capability of an IT Department with the expertise of seasoned professionals to deliver focused application operations to your company’s business application users. Simply put, an MS is designed to handle the daily operations of your specialized applications providing the capability to your company end-users and therefore allowing in-house IT to focus on more strategic IT programs, also freeing your team to focus on your business’ core competencies.

This shows up often when IT professionals notice a decline in the current repository of knowledge, reducing the quality of IT service to your company. Other symptoms of a need for an MS include following:

• “We didn’t achieve everything we wanted last year due to a lack of Service and Support”
• “We had too many service outages and downtime”
• “We overspent our budget on tweaks to our business applications that eroded its performance”
• “We lost data due to lack of ability with the solution”

From my experience working with small and large client companies alike, I often suggest how a managed service can help address these challenges. In my career, I have worked with many clients that are utilizing managed services in a variety of ways. Most recently, I provided a managed service to a large energy company which found the service to be seamless and significantly improved the satisfaction of end users and IT support staff, globally.

If you’re sensing some of these dynamics at your company, here are some personnel and technology suggestions on how you can reorganize and empower your IT Department for growth via MS.

Assessing the Need

Today, IT managers are under significant pressure to meet the performance, operational expectations, and security needs of the business while trying to keep costs down. Most of the financial experts would suggest in these conditions to switch to a predictable cost model, like that of a managed service. A company that provides such services is called a Managed Service Provider (MSP). The best time to consider speaking with a MSP is when you are setting future strategic goals or deploying new services to your IT environment. Many times, a company’s existing staff may not be experienced with a new technology or able to maintain new services or applications. Hiring contractors to provide the service may be more expensive and provide less value in supporting your company’s ever-growing performance goals, given astatic or declining budget. This is often true for small, medium and large companies alike.

Managed Service models have evolved over time, and the seasoned providers have perfected their delivery. It is very effective for a business that:

• Relies on their IT Infrastructure to properly support their daily business processes
• Do not have sufficiently trained staff or time to formally deal with proper maintenance, updates and repairs
• Want to pay one monthly, flat fee for services to provide a high level of service quality to the business

For most business services, IT underpins the business engine. From software to hardware and the skills required to keep the service running, a company could invest significant capital in building and maintaining the in-house support staff. However, given the maturity of the managed service models and the shift to virtualization and cloud, the need for on-site IT staff can be limited to the exceptions where operational sensitivity justifies it. To ensure greater IT cost predictability amid uncertain requirements, a company may consider leveraging managed service experts.

MSPs usually price their services on a subscription basis. Based on the services selected, the pricing is usually scoped on the number of devices with pricing aligned to packages across a range of categories. Some provide customer support on-site when required. Basic services often start with a monitoring service, which identifies potential issues, which you resolve on your own. At the other end of the spectrum, service providers offer comprehensive managed services that cover everything from alerts through problem resolution.

Benefits of Managed Services

Better Cost Control: Cost factors for a business service depend on an organization’s requirement for availability and criticality of a particular service.

The typical cost components of an IT department, including training, equipment and personnel, are absorbed by the MSP and presented as a fixed monthly charge to the company. This helps in effectively predicting costs every month when budgeting. Depending on the future requirements and the speed of the your organization’s IT maturity, the managed service can scale to address such scenarios. The biggest benefit is that a company can decide how much to scale based on factors that may include finance and the CIO’s strategic vision. IT Service interruptions and outages can also be prevented, thus mitigating the risk of further losses. In terms of the energy company, the client went from multiple daily outages to one scheduled outage a month.

Improved Risk Management: Every business carries a certain amount of risk. This can be minimized by lowering the individual risk involved with each business service identified as critical. A MSP can help reduce risk by contributing their own proprietary methodologies and access to modern infrastructure and software. This enables adherence to best practices and minimizes risk involved in the service delivery.

The MSP assumes and manages much of the risk for the company it serves by having specific industry knowledge, especially around security and compliance issues. They can partner with your business and guide you on the best way to avoid risk in your domains of expertise.

High Availability, Efficiency and Productivity: For an IT Service, the saying time is money” always applies. For optimal company performance, constant availability of a mission-critical IT services are the top priority for many organizations. While assessing the true cost of downtime is hard, it is always recommended to take proactive steps to avoid it completely. At worst, reputational risk could be a factor when the outage comes to the attention of those outside the company potentially eroding public trust. Clients experience better performance with minimal downtime when using a managed service. Many times, mission-critical applications involve multiple technologies and require them to be fully operational and integrated to achieve the IT service expected. All component applications must be available together for the IT service to function seamlessly for internal end-users. A MSP can ensure maximum uptime and minimal service interruptions.

Organizations that attempt to implement and support all IT services in-house usually have a much higher research and development cost as well as longer timelines to deploy –costs may also be passed on to the organizations wishing to consume these services. The MSP is highly efficient in delivering IT services in a way that keeps costs low and the time to deploy short while providing a high-quality service to the business.

Future Proofing IT Services: IT departments will always have funding, technical, security, and operational challenges. As you look for strategies to minimize spend, I have seen many organizations effectively utilize AMS to achieve the full benefit of seamless service integration with less worry over resource constraints. MSP’s will always have their staff trained on upcoming and new releases as well as new technologies with the ability to lock-in costs for a multi-year period. By creating more predictability, your business will reduce operational risk, challenges and minimize service disruption.

Things to Keep in Mind

Managed Service Providers bring not only practical delivery of a predictable service model an
d cost to quickly and effectively deliver new IT service to an enterprise, but also enhance the stability and peace of mind for IT and business leaders alike.

The task of delivering new business services to the enterprise while keeping costs controlled is a difficult task in the modern business environment. A managed service is a great strategy to help your IT organization be highly resilient, and cost predictable, fiscal year to fiscal year. MSPs complement and do not replace existing staff but rather free those valuable resources to lead and deliver on the strategic IT programs necessary to advance business goals. In larger organizations, an MSP will help your resources to focus on more strategic projects. You can rest assured that your company is minimizing the risks associated with maintaining client data and sensitive competitive information and more with today’s managed service offerings.

As you embark on investing in a new application, consider taking advantage of various managed service offerings to stay on top of IT business needs and minimize unsystemic risks. If you are considering a BMC technology investment, please fill out our ContactMe form to speak with someone about our MS options.

These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC’s position, strategies, or opinion.

See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing [email protected].

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Backlinks are links created on other sites that link to your site. As such, you don’t always know when they are created. In a previous article, “So You Want Backlinks,” guidelines were given on backlink building. When it comes time to build backlinks, you don’t have to do everything from scratch. Rather, you can analyze your site’s URLs, determine what backlinks already exist, and tap into existing best practices for link building, which improves your search engine optimization (SEO).

More importantly, a lot of bad practices were mentioned in the previous article. These were practices that can hurt your site including getting links from spammy sites, having broken links to your site, and more. Find these potential toxic backlinks on other sites can be easy if you have the right tool! In fact, there are a number of tools that can help you work with backlinks.

A Caution on Backlinks and Tools

In addition to helping you structure backlinks, they can also help you with suggestions on backlinks you should ask to be removed. Automated tools are not perfect. You should review any suggestions to remove (or even keep) backlinks. There are times when it might make sense to keep a link that is flagged as having an issue. There might also be times when a tool doesn’t catch that a link really isn’t appropriate.

There are tools that focus specifically on backlinking. There are also SEO tools that have sections focused on backlinking as part of a larger overall SEO approach. Both types of tools can be effective. The key benefit of the tools is to get a list of existing backlinks to your site or a page on your site as well as to get insights on the benefit or toxicity of each link. If the tool can help you with getting links removed, that can be a benefit as well.

You want to avoid tools that offer to build automatic backlinks for you.

The Backlinking Tools

The following are four tools that can be used to identify and manage backlinks. These are tools that have been identified as useful for backlink analysis. There is a brief description of each of these below.

• SEMRush
• AHrefs
• Open Site Explorer
• OpenLinkProfiler

Note that there are a multitude of other tools marketed for backlink analysis and building. Many of the tools suggested to me for this article included features for selling backlinks, building automated backlinks, and for tracking backlink trades. As such, they were dropped from this article. These are bad practices, and thus worth avoiding.

Backlink Tool 1: SemRush

SEMRush provides a multitude of tools including a Backlink Audit tool that will give you deep insights into the links coming to your site. You can configure it to look at backlinks in a number of ways as well see individual backlinks. In addition to providing data such as backlink types, domain distribution, top anchors, country sources, and a list of linking domains, SEMRush also provides a toxicity score for each backlink that lets you know the potential for negative impact.

Basic features of SEMRush can be used at no cost.

Figure 1: SemRush Backlink data for MSN.com

Backlink Tool 2: AHrefs

Ahrefs is another of the more popular SEO tools known for its backlink tools. Ahrefs provides competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink research. Within the backlink data, you can get information on the new and broken backlinks, referring domains, anchor tags, top referring content, and more.

Ahrefs is not a free tool, but they do provide a low-cost trial.

Figure 2: Ahref backlink data for HTMLGoodies.com

Backlink Tool 3: Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a part of the Moz Pro SEO tools. Like the previous two tools mentioned, Open Site Explorer provides tools to help you identify and optimize your backlink strategy. This includes showing backlinks to your site, providing spam scores, showing a spam score (similar to SEMRush’s toxicity score) for links, and more. Open Site Explorer helps you identify which of your pages are most valuable, which domains are best of those linking to your site, what text is being used to build the links, and more. It also provides linking opportunities and helps you to avoid penalties by showing you which links to clean up.

You can access a limited portion of Open Site Explorer’s functionality online. There is also a 30-day free trial. Otherwise, you need a subscription to Moz to continue to use the product.

Figure 3: Moz Open Site Explorer

Backlink Tool 4: OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler is a free online tool that can be used to do backlink analysis. You can go to the website as shown in Figure 4 and simply enter a site URL. Once you do, you’ll get a backlink analysis similar to what is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 4: OpenLinkProfiler page for entering a domain

As you can see in Figure 5, OpenLinkProfiler provides information on active links relative to the domain you entered. You can get anchor text, when the link was added as well as the industry and topic of some of the links. A Risk score similar to the toxicity and spam scores from other tools, can also be found to determine which links are potentially harmful. While SEOLink Profiler comes at no cost, to use some of the features, such as link notifications the exporting of a PDF report, you will need to set up a free account.

Figure 5: OpenLinkProfiler review of HTMLGoodies.com

Dealing with Bad Links

What do you do if you find bad backlinks on another site? There are generally two approaches that are taken. One is to ask that the link be removed. The other is to ask that the link be tagged with a ‘rel=nofollow’ tag. If a link already has a ‘rel=nofollow’ tag included, then no further action is really needed unless the site containing the link is really one you don’t want to be associated with.

Dealing with the removal of links to disavow them from your site is a process in itself that is worthy of its own article. In general, using a disavow tool should be a last resort for spammy backlinks. You can use the Google Search Console to disavow links. Additionally, most of the tools mentioned in this article not only show you how bad a backlink might be for your site, they generally include tools to help you disavow them as well. Look for an article on disavowing bad backlinks in the near future!

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