Yahoo Site Explorer is a great tool for bloggers concerned about their competition, bloggers doing keyword research, and to check the status of your own blog.  This site explorer will tell you how many backlinks a site has, how many pages it has, and where all these backlinks are coming from.

What can you do with this information?

• Check out your competition for a particular keyword, and see if you’ll be able to conquer it
• Use this to find high PR backlinks from sites that are ranking well
• Check out how many backlinks you have of your own, and which ones are taking effect
• See what backlinking method is working

This is a great tool to use and I use it very often, usually every day.  If you’re concerned about getting ranked, you should as well.

There aren’t too many options with the site explorer.  One feature that is awesome is the My Sites dashboard.  This allows you to store however many sites you want on it for quick referencing.  I have all my sites on there and a few sites of other people’s that I like to check out.

If you choose not to use that feature, you can just as easily type the site in the prompt and will be taken to the information you ask for.