Open Site Explorer is one of the many link analysis tools out there that can help SEO consultants and business owners to analyze the authority of their websites, Launch Jacking. Launched by SEOmoz, Open Site Explorer is a free tool that could perhaps become an eventual replacement for the soon-to-be-killed Yahoo Site Explorer.
Open Site Explorer for novice users
In the overcrowded field of SEO tools, Open Site Explorer stands out as one of the easiest to use — perfect for the most novice of users. If you’re new to SEO and its concepts and terminology, you wouldn’t want to browse through complicated Excel spreadsheets with complex, mind-boggling data.
Open Site Explorer makes it easy for you to analyze links, keywords, and the overall performance of your site to help you improve your ranking in search engines.
Use Open Site Explorer to analyze your own domain
You don’t want all your hard work to go to waste, so it is imperative for every Web marketer and SEO provider to monitor each website and make sure links are delivering results.
Open Site Explorer does a number of things. By simply typing in your URL on the search bar and clicking Get Link Data, you are able to view a wealth of data including page authority, domain authority, and the number of links to your site.
On the Linking Pages tab, filter the results to show all links from external pages only to all pages on the root domain. On the Show dropdown menu you can choose to eliminate nofollow links that may not have much SEO value. The list of inbound links is ordered by page authority.
On the Top Pages list you can see the highest authority pages on your site.
On the Linking Domains tab you can view the URLs linking to your site, listed according to domain authority.
Finally, there is the Anchor Text Distribution list where you can view the number of links and root domains that contain a specific anchor text.
Use Open Site Explorer to check out the competition
Spying on the competition can also help in optimizing your site. Simply click the “Add URL to Compare” link below the search box and type in your competitor’s domain to see how their website is faring against yours. You can even find domains you should target for linking from the list of links that your competition is on.
See how your website and the competition are doing by using the user-friendly, Linkscape-powered Open Site Explorer tool.
