Measuring your SEO Success–Backlinks

It is a known fact that backlinks are one of the major factors which Google consider while indexing our websites in their search results. The more you have the better. But it is also important to take care of the quality of backlinks that you get for your website as building backlinks the wrong way can screw you over with the Big G.
Google looks at many factors while ranking a website and some of these which I personally consider important are:
Backlinks
The count and the quality
Age of the domain and if it's static or frequently updated.
Relevancy of the backlinks on your website. (On-Page)

While optimizing your website for Search Engines, it is very important to measure your work versus results output. This helps both the client and us to measure how the results are affected in each stage of work done.
Checking your backlinks is one of the most important steps while creating a strategy of your website. BlueBacklinks is the website I currently recommend to check your backlinks. It not only provides a list of backlinks your website currently has, but also analyses them and provides you with the Anchor Text, the external links found on the page which has your backlink and if it's dofollow or no follow. The is also a nifty tool which gets you a brief statistics of your website which contain pagerank, alexa rank, DMOZ listing and top anchor texts found on the backlinks. Another neat feature I liked about the website is its ability to export the backlinks as a excel file which you can use to document your SEO efforts. I usually visit the website once a week to update the page so that I can check how many backlinks have been indexed by website and accelerate or decelerate our backlink building process.
I hope to cover more tools in the weeks ahead to better measure your SEO efforts.