Monitoring your inbound links is a great way to gauge the progress of your website. Inbound links, or backlinks, give you a picture of who is taking an interest in your site. Compare your inbound links to those of your competing websites, and discover new relationships to build.

Here is a list of tools to analyze your link profile. There are dedicated link identifiers, full search-engine-optimization suites, and link tools for search engines. There are both free and paid tools.

Link Research Tools

Ahrefs. Analyze your own sites and get a quick summary of any URL, for free. Analyze other sites and visually compare multiple sites. Ahrefs lists all the backlinks for the true picture of a site. Get statistics of backlinks on a URL, path, domain, or domain hierarchy with subdomains. Price: Free account gives 3 reports and 15 queries per day; Premium accounts start at $49/month for 20 reports and 500 queries per day.

Analyze Backlinks. See all the backlinks of your site or your competitor’s site. Check your number of social links, such as Likes and Tweets, or get Google keyword and page rankings. Price: Free.

Backlink Finder. Backlink Finder is a quick and easy tool to check your backlinks. Check your Google PageRank, Alexa traffic, and generate a backlink report. Price: Free.

Backlink Reporter. Banklink Reporter offers a free backlink checker tool. It also offers a service to track and manage your links, get PageRank and link text, scan meta attributes, and create reports. Price: Free plan lets you save and manage 3 websites and 100 links per site. Premium plans start at $7 per month for 7 websites and 1,000 links per site.

Backlink Watch. Backlink Watch provides an inbound link report for a site. Get backlink URLs, total external links found on inbound-link pages, PageRank of backlink sites, anchor text, and more. Price: Free.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Get a comprehensive view of the sites that are linking to your site. Webmaster Tools include several other aids, such as a keyword tool and traffic stats. Price: Free.