Cyberspace has become a huge boon to consumers as they can find and buy online everything they wish. But that's a kind of mixed blessing for folks running online business, since there is a great number of similar products and services, which makes beating online competition extremely tough.

As soon as you have set your online venture you can't waste a single second in fierce online competition struggle. Otherwise, if sit back and relax your site will eventually get covered with dust somewhere in the doldrums of Internet.

The first thing to do after you have created your website is to make Google aware of it. Search engine spiders may occasionally stumble upon your website, when crawling the World Wide Web. They carry this info to search engines datacenters and search engines may automatically submit your site. But you can significantly speed up the process. Go to Google, find "submit URL" link and notify the search engine that your website is live. It means your site will be added for Google's spiders to crawl.

But it's not enough. To make your website shoot to Google's top you must run a proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. At a very basic level it refers to placing enough keywords on a webpage and building a wide-spread network of good quality links to your website. So, you must raise flags all over the web for Google spiders to stumble on them, knock at your website's door again and again and carry the updated information to search engines that will lift up your website in search results.

Proper usage of keywords is important, but without link building SEO campaign can't be a success. A good quality link works like a weighty vote that adds to your website popularity. If your site has a solid backlink profile search engines assume that the site is popular with visitors, has good quality content and lots of folks want link to it. All that results in high rankings and mind-blogging sales.

When running a link building campaign you must check how many incoming links your website has and what value they all carry. You also shouldn't forget about monitoring your competition and check their websites as well, since that can help you discover premium quality backlink sources and capitalize on them. There's no need to say, that doing this job manually is ineffective time hog. But you can skip all that routine if you get armed with a cutting edge backlink checker.

There are a lot of backlink tools for backlink research and analysis available on the Web. The top 3 that have won a huge share of popularity among users are Yahoo! Site Explorer, Backlink Watch and SEO SpyGlass.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a free SEO tool for backlink research and analysis. It provides users with the list of backlinks pointing to the targeted domain. To get the results you just go to Yahoo! search and enter link:yoursite[dot]com. The system will automatically redirect you to Site Explorer, where you'll be able to see the list of links to the specified website.

Yahoo! Site Explorer can be of great help in backlink research, but it isn't perfect. Its main drawback is that it never shows more than 1,000 links for a specified domain, so you'll have to damp internal links and check links to deeper pages to get a complete picture of a website's backlink profile.

Backlink Watch

It's a free SEO tool powered by Yahoo! Site Explorer. It lets you not only see who is linked to a specified website, but also provides you with some extra data for further analysis. Alongside with the list of backlinks it shows you the info concerning link value, the exact anchor text for the link or the image, etc. All that lets you get a more coherent account on a website's backlink profile. But since Backlink Watch pulls its results from Yahoo! Site Explorer it can't break the 1,000 limit of backlinks.

SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass is SEO software that focuses on backlink research and analysis. There are three versions of this backlink tool available: free (with slightly limited features) and paid (that includes the number of unique features). SEO SpyGlass a breakthrough solution for website optimization since it's the only SEO tool that lets you find up to 50,000 of backlinks for a targeted website in 655 search engines.

SEO SpyGlass not only provides you with an extensive list of links, but also lets you get the most complete picture of a website's backlink profile. This tool shows the exact anchor text and anchor URLs site owners are using, the number of links coming from forums and blogs, Google PR, Alexa Rank, the exact age of a website. It also checks for a website's submission into Yahoo! and DMOZ directories and many other important factors.