What's the best keyword & backlink tracking tool?

[driver105]

I do minimal in-house SEO work for my company as and part of this I have to give reports on where we rank for a long list of keywords every month. For the past 6 months or so I've been using a free tool from www.digitalpoint.com which seems to do a pretty good job of giving me the rankings and +/- changes from month to month, as well as how many backlinks we have.

Does anyone know of a better or more robust tool to use for this. I think I get what I need with digitalpoint, but maybe I'm missing something, or it's giving me incorrect readings (I don't have time to check all keywords by hand, obviously.)

Also, along with this, I've noticed that the number of backlinks we have wtih Google never changes, and I know for a fact that our company has gotten press and links on some major sites (like Skype, Inc. Magazine, etc.) as well as in blogs and industry sites, but the number of backlinks never changes no matter how many times Google re-indexes. Anyone know why?

Thanks!

[dazzlindonna]

I've used a few checking tools and for your purposes, I'd say DP's tool is as good as any. I'd stick with it. As for backlinks not changing, first off, Google's link: command is worthless, but also, I don't think there've been many backlink updates in the last 6 months. There might have been one or two, I don't really remember. In any case, even if you did see a change, it really wouldn't help you much, since the link: command is so useless. i.e., I wouldn't worry about it. yahoo and msn show more links for you, i assume?

[toprank]

Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) is handy for checking backlinks.

Marketleap's link popularity tool (http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/default.htm) is interesting because it will show historical data - but the Google info is not very accurate because it uses the link: command.

[findinforums]

This tool (http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/) is good too :P
and this one (http://www.irank.info/graph.php?url=www.findinforums.com)