It’s a paid service, but there are many free tools you can use on their website as well. For instance, right on the homepage you can type your domain name and click on “Explore Links” to get an overview of how your website is doing.

As you can see from the screenshot above you get a lot of data back. For instance, you can see the total number fo backlinks, how it evolved over the past 30 days, how many are coming from .gov and .edu sites, how many are text and image links and so on.

Paid users can also check all the links, including the Alexa rank of the site that is linking to you and the anchor text used.

Another free tool you can is the domain comparisson one. You basically input two domain names and the tool will compare their backlink profile for you, including an estimation of search engine traffic over time. I tested with some of my domains and the accuracy of the information wasn’t bad.

Finally there’s a SERP analysis tool which will find all the keywords you rank for and organize them in a nice table, where you can see your position for each keyword, the average CPC spent for that keyword, the amount of traffic that keyword attracts and so on. Non registered users can see the first 10 keywords.

The basic plan starts at $49 monthly, which could be worth it if you are a professional SEO or webmaster. It looks like they are constantly adding more free tools, too, so check it out anyway.

Over the coming weeks I am planning to post a couple of posts explaining the two easiest ways to move WordPress sites around different hosts/servers (one for small blogs, and one for large ones).

Before the transfer phase, though, you need to figure out what hosting company you’ll use, though, and I recommend that you take a look at HostGator. I host most of my websites with them, and the hosting quality is the best you’ll find in the market.

In fact a couple of months ago I asked DBT readers what web host they used, and almost 80% of them said HostGator, most saying they really liked the service.

There’s also a way for you to test drive their hosting plan practically for free. You can use the coupon dailyblogtips2012 to get $10 off your first order, which means your first month will be free. After that you have 30 days to test everything, and if the service doesn’t live up to your expectations you’ll just need to cancel your account without spending any extra money. I am pretty sure you’ll decide to stay though.

Stay tuned for the posts explaining how to move WordPress sites around.

I am talking about Google Insights for Search. The overall idea is quite similar, but Google Insights gives you more tools to tailor and customize the data you are trying to understand.

For instance, you can compare search queries from specific regions, search type (e.g., web, image, video, etc), categories and so on. The interface is not as simple as the Google Trends one, but understand how it all works is straight forward.

Overall it’s a nice addition to your online toolbelt, to check it out.

HostGator (which is the company I use and recommend) will be offering a 50% discount on all plans, from shared hosting to dedicated servers. The 50% discount coupon will be applied automatically to your bill if you purchase between the midnight of November 24 (that is right now) and the midnight of November 25.

Here are some of the deals you can get:

• Shared hosting for $2.48 monthly (paid upfront)
• Reseller hosting for $12.48 monthly (paid upfront)
• VPS hosting for $9.98 (first month)
• Dedicated servers for $87 (first month)

Current clients can also benefit from those discounts as long as they use them for new accounts. Just head to HostGator.com if you want to check all the details and sign-up.

So what alternatives do we have?

Unfortunately none that adequately substitutes what Yahoo! Site Explorer used to offer, and that is a reliable count of the backlinks of a site (including a list of said backlinks).

Google has the “link:domain.com” query, which is supposed to show the backlinks of a site, but only displays a very small sample of the backlinks, to avoid people reverse engineering Google’s algorithm.

If you want to see the backlinks of sites you own the best bet is Google Webmasters Tools.

If you want to see the backlinks of sites you don’t own you can try using the Open Site Explorer, which is a tool created by the SEOMoz guys. It track much fewer links that what Yahoo! used to, but as far as I know it’s the best alternative online.

What about you, what tool do you use to check the backlink of a given website?