Your plan for search engine optimization success should include a campaign to attract links from other web sites.  Â

The number and quality of other web sites that create "inbound links" or "backlinks" to your web site is critical in determining how your web site ranks in search engine results. This is because each link essentially counts as "vote" for the quality of your site's content. Every vote you get helps your web site rank higher in search results and attract more fr.e.e traffic from potential customers.

How to find your site's backlinks to improve your SEO:

* Google: Just visit Google.com and type in: link:yourURL

This simple query will show you the number of backlinks your web site has from other sites across the web. The more of these, the better for SEO purposes.

Unfortunately, Google doesn't display all your existing inbound links (usually only showing ~25% of them). So, many webmasters also use Google Webmaster Tools (and Yahoo!) to find a more exact number of links to your site from other parts of the Web.

* Google Webmaster Tools: You can register your web site for fre-e with Google to take advantage of its "Webmaster Tools." Doing so will give you access to additional, more detailed reporting on how Google has indexed your web site's pages, your site's backlinks, and diagnostic tools (for checking on 404 errors and similar advanced topics). Highly recommended and fr-e-e but a bit more work to set up and analyze.

* Yahoo:Â Type into the Yahoo search box: linkdomain:yourURL

Yahoo will then display all the pages its index contain which include links back to your web site. [Tip: You may want to try using both yourURL and www.yourURL in the search - results can vary.]

If this SEO linking analysis shows you that important pages on your site have few or no other sites linking back to them, you know where to concentrate your link exchange or publicity efforts to attract some.

As more fully explained in my Special Report "F-ree SEO in Plain English", you should then review the content on your most linked-to pages.

If you can detect why those pages are good at attracting links, you can do more of it!