This is the second part of the article about link building and backlink checking tools, be sure to check the first one called "Link Building Tips and Tools Part One: Directories & Article Marketing". Without further ado let's get right into the meat of the link building advice.

Forum commenting

There are lots of forums on the internet, where you can not only speak out your mind and share your ideas, but also drop some links leading to your website. Most forums let you add a dofollow link in your signature and choose your anchor text that will be displayed below each of your posts there.

But be careful. Make sure that you speak to the point of the threads' topics. Don't just drop in spamming with the posts about your product, otherwise you are running a risk of being banned and all your optimization efforts on this field will be in vain.

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites are one of the most widely used tools for link building. They can make considerable contribution into SEO and gear up your business on-line.

Before the advent of social bookmarking sites saving the ways to favorite web stuff looked like that: users had to click the bookmark icon in their browser and save the link. This is known as offline bookmarking. But now with the online bookmarking they can do much more. Social bookmarking sites let store, tag and share one's favorite links. Now users can access to the list of their favorite sites from any place where you can find internet connection, they can arrange their favorite links, split them into categories and moreover they can share those links with friends, colleagues or just a random guy, who hits their account.

Social bookmarking sites can be used for SEO purposes in two ways. First, search engines crawlers love links coming from there, because these sites are treated as credible link sources. That adds up to the level of credibility to your site and lets it gradually move up in search results. Second, social bookmarking puts the idea of favoring and promoting website content on steroids. People, who have accounts on social bookmarking sites may interact with your content: rate it up, comment on it, repost, crosspost it in their blogs, which eventually makes it go viral. All that works like a chain reaction that ends up in your website's higher rankings.

In a word, social bookmarking sites make the cream of the cyberspace rise to the top.

Top 10 of social bookmarking sites are: Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Newsvine.com, Delicious, Fark, Blinklist, Clipmarks, Showtwire, etc.

Link baiting

The notion of link baiting is self-explanatory. This term has been recently coined in SEO sphere and basically it's about creating some appealing web content that is aimed at generating links leading to your website. With the increasing popularity of social bookmarking sites and blog platforms the content can easily go viral, brining more visitors and traffic to your site.

Some webmasters and bloggers describe link baiting as one of the methods of link building, the other say that it's a natural outcome of making up compelling website content. But indeed link baiting is a wide-ranging notion that includes a great variety of practices, such as writing mind-blogging, sensational and even raising controversy posts, conducing awards, organizing on-line competitions and lots more.

So, is you stretch up the resources of your imagination and shape outstanding content you can garner a lot of high quality links, your website can gain more popularity and automatically excel in terms of rankings.

Link exchange

Link exchange can augment your on-line popularity to the heights and boost you website's traffic.

Exchanging your links with other sites you must take into account the following points. First of all links from different site have different SEO value. For instance links from sites with a higher PR (Google's standard determining the quality of a website) are much more valuable for SEO. Another key point is relevancy. If you have a website about organizing wedding ceremonies and get a link from some funeral agency's website it's not going to work out well for your SEO.

Also mind that reciprocal links have practically no effect on SEO. Search engine spiders tend to ignore the links that are obtained in quid-pro-quo way. That's why you have to build up more complicated schemes of link exchange, such as three-, four-way links, link-rings etc.

When you get your links you can't but keep a hawk eye on them. You should run constant checks to control whether your links stay in place and your link partners don't cheat you.

And after all keep in mind that SEO job is never done, what concerns link building. You can't relax and rest on laurels since it is an ongoing process and demands your constant attention.

A good backlink checker- a keystone to on-line success.

As you see, link building is quite long and painstaking process. That's why you can't do without good SEO software.

A backlink checker is an indispensible leg-up in website optimization. It can help you tackle the challenges that may you may face when doing link building. A cutting edge backlink checker sniffs out the premium quality link sources, does the research of your own backlink profile or X-rays the links of your on-line competitors, checks whether the links leading to your website stay in place and many more. It's a must-have SEO tool that will assist you in your quest for links and finally contribute to your website's high ranking.

There are lots of free and paid backlink checkers out there. Among the most widely used in SEO are Yahoo! Site Explorer, Backlink Watch and SEO PowerSuite.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is the grandpa of all backlink checkers that has ever existed. It is free and easy in use. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website and it generates the list of sites lined to yours. But maybe because of its advanced age it can't handle some tough link checking tasks properly. Sometimes it shows the wrong count of backlinks and it lets you check only 1,000 of them per domain, no matter how many links your website actually has.

Backlink Watch is another on-line SEO tool that lets you check what sites link to your webpage. Basically it works like Yahoo! Site Explorer: you are to enter your website's URL and run the app. Besides the info about links to your site it provides you with some valuable analytical data such as the anchor text of the backlinks, the title of linking pages, whether the links are dofollow or nofollow etc. But don't expect that Backlink Watch work wonders and provide you with a complete list of backlinks. It shares the same database with Yahoo! Site Explorer, that's why the results will be practically the same.

If you exercise a serious approach to link building you need a solid backlink checker. One of them is SEO SpyGlass. It's the only backlink checker that has bypassed 1,000 links limit and reached the record number of links found per site – 50, 000. Besides SEO SpyGlass evaluates each link according to 26 criteria, such as Google Page rank, Alexa Rank, the number of links that come from Yahoo! or DMOZ directories, exact anchor texts and URLs of each link, domain age, exact link value and dozens more.

So, as you see, good SEO tools can uncover nuggets of opportunity for your optimization campaign. The only thing that is left for you to do is bet on the winning horse and choose the software that really works.