Inbound Links 101 – What You Need to Know

Inbound links (also known as backlinks) are an SEO strategy that savvy businesses use to their advantage to improve their visibility online on organic search channels such as Google, Yahoo search and Bing (to name a few.) Utilising strong inbound links that lead to your website can help boost your organic visibility and amass more traffic. 

Boosting your visibility takes time, consideration and work. This article will be your digital guide to learning the ins and outs of inbound links and how you can make them work for you to bring in organic traffic and turn visits into conversions.

What Are Inbound Links?

Inbound links are third-party links that direct visitors to your page. These links drive visitors to websites as well as establish credibility and improve SEO. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines consider inbound links to be a kind of “vote” for a specific page and pages with a high number of inbound links are ones that tend to have a high organic ranking. Since inbound links point to your site, they commonly are called “backlinks,” as they refer “back” to your site. 

Glossary Of Terms

Here are some terms that you will want to know for optimising your website with inbound links:

• Link Juice: When another page links to any of your content or front page, it passes “link juice.” This “link juice” helps with the ranking of your content and also improves the domain authority. Think of link juice as equity passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed on through hyperlinks which search engines see as “votes” by other websites that your page has value and is worth promoting.
  
• No-Follow Link: This is when a website links to a different website, but the link has a no-follow tag, which means that it is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favour, does not boost PageRank and does not help the page’s placement in the SERPs (search engine results page.) Use no-follow links if you sold the link, someone paid you to post their content or if you think you could get in trouble for posting the link.
  
• Do-Follow Link: These are all the links that you add to a blog post/content post. These pass the “link juice” litmus test.
  
• Anchor Text: This is the text that is used for your hyperlinks. Anchor text backlinks are great for trying to rank for certain keywords or phrases.
  
• Linking Root Domains: The number of inbound links coming to your page from a unique domain. If a website links to your website ten times, it will only count as one linked root domain.

How Are Inbound Links Beneficial?

No matter what term you hear, be it backlinks, inbound links, external links, or link building, they all refer to the process of getting other websites to link to your website. It may sound easy, but there is a lot that goes into getting inbound links this way, (we will go over the ways to do this next) but when you do, you actively see the benefits from successful link building in your SEO metrics. 

Benefits

1. More Traffic. When you engage in successful link building, you will — of course — get more traffic. What you want is quality traffic that can lead to conversions and a lower bounce rate in tandem. This all looks great for the algorithm and adds to your search “votes” so you can slowly build your way up the rankings.
2. Improve Your SEO. When Google notices websites increasingly linking to your website, it will register that your website is a viable one to link to and must be of a higher authority than others in the niche your keywords are targeting. This helps your rank status improve as well. 
3. Raise Brand Awareness. As well as boosting your SEO metrics, inbound links also build awareness of your brand and business by gaining you exposure digitally and via word of mouth. 
4. Networking. Inbound links also get your business added traffic from other search engines from around the web and therefore keep boosting your SEO from the places in which they are shared. 

What Constitutes A Good Inbound Link?

Quality backlinks — unsurprisingly — have characteristics in common that set them (and your site) up for success:

• They use anchor text, which should be descriptive and precise. 
• They come from trustworthy sites. 
• They come from a bevy of different sources. 
• They open a new tab or window and don’t redirect.

There is a lot more that goes into inbound links than just a few keywords and a hyperlink. Knowing how to enhance your page’s SEO and inbound traffic leads to more visitors, more conversions, more repeat business, and more recognition for all your hard work. If it seems like a little too much for you to tackle alone, don’t worry, you’re not alone and there are resources available to take the burden off of you.

Does Your Website Need A Boost?

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