Businesses with an online presence rely on inbound links to grow traffic. This is the way by which Google discovers web pages and ranks your content.
The content strategy for your business will include content, SEO, and links. While using multiple algorithms developed to rank pages, Google still considers links to be an important factor to improve the page rank of a web page.
What Is an Inbound Link?
An inbound link is defined as any link from another website to your website. Because they refer back to your website, they are also known as backlinks. Search engines consider a link to be a backlink based on two factors:
- The link to your page.
- The anchor text to which it is attached.
Inbound links give search engines a lot of information on how valuable and trustworthy your content is. A blog on your website with a lot of inbound links from renowned websites exhibits trustworthiness as they allow a link of theirs to be used as a backlink in your website. It is like having votes of confidence for your content and your website.
Link-building enforces link authority on your website. That link authority is based on how many trusted websites you link to your domain as well as to your individual web page. Pages with high link authority can pass on some of the authority of their sites to other pieces of content they link to. It is something like befriending an influential person or a politician and in turn, you become famous in your locality, by virtue of association. It signals the search engine that you are a trustworthy source of information.
Why Does Google Give Importance to Inbound Links?
Search engines use algorithms to evaluate websites by topic and relevance. Usually, the Google bot crawls through your website to index newly included pages to its library. Google indexes the web pages so that it structures pages in the search engine index, helping it to display the optimal result when a user searches for a query.
Search engine optimization (SEO) ranks pages on certain factors and displays the search engine result page (SERP) based on the ranking. The ranking factors are based on criteria such as page quality, keyword relevancy, and multimedia content. Yet, links continue to be the favorite for Google to rank.
Google measures the relevance of the content using inbound links. This was Google’s innovation that crushed the other search engines like Alta Vista and Lycos that considered only keywords to rank a page.
When users noticed that the results on the search engine result page were not relevant to their query, Google started link popularity as a ranking factor and it was hard to fake inbound links in the content. Thus, Google started to dominate the search engine domain as it was able to pick relevant sites; and relevance comes from link building.
Types of Links
There are different types of links on and off a website. The links that you see on a website are internal and outbound links.
Internal Link
Internal links are links on a web page that take you to another web page of the same website or domain. These links make the user stay on the website for a longer time as they redirect to the web page on the same site. This increases the web authority that contributes to the page ranking.
External Link
External links are the links that redirect you to another website while you are surfing a particular website. These types of links are usually provided when there is an elaborate explanation of a term on another web page. In that case, you provide a link to that term that points to another website. External links are organic and cannot be controlled and that’s why they too are a factor for ranking.
Inbound Links
Inbound links, also known as backlinks, are the links a website receives when another website links back to your site. More backlinks signify more relevance, usefulness, and importance and they contribute to the ranking on SERP.
Why Are Inbound Links Important to SEO?
Inbound links are undoubtedly the most important SEO factor for the following benefits it offers:
Higher Rank
Google uses more than 200 factors to rank a web page in the SERP results. One of the strongest is the inbound link and it is important that you have high-quality inbound links for Google to rank your web page. These are links to authoritative, trustworthy, and credible sites that contain verified as and trusted content.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable link on your web page and an essential part of both internal and external linking that Google considers for ranking a web page. The website name is used in the anchor text which when clicked directs the user to that particular site. A well-optimized anchor text has to be descriptive and when the users click on it, it must link to the site that explains what the user was searching for.
Link Authority
Inbound links pass on their link authority to your website, which boosts your site’s credibility and authority. It is good to have a reasonable number of backlinks on your website, but not too many or too few. Analyze your competitor’s website to know the number of inbound links they have on their site. If they have 5, then be a step ahead and include at least 8 links from authoritative sites.
Increased Traffic
Your site is likely higher to rank in SERP results when you have a reasonable number of high-quality links on your webpage. Increased traffic to your site indicates more visitors which is a lead generation strategy. Such leads convert to potential customers and sales.
Enhanced Brand Awareness
When you link credible sources to your webpage, their strong brand recognition is associated with yours. In turn, your business too gains brand awareness and users view your brand to be reputable.
FAQS
How to find inbound links for a website?
You can find the inbound links for a website by getting the list of backlink URLs, knowing the anchor text of those links, and calculating the authority score. Some tools that are used to check it are:
How do inbound links work?
Google’s search algorithms value inbound links for ranking. Google assesses the links that point to another webpage when determining the rank of a webpage. Google search engine’s PageRank algorithm considers the links to rank the content.
Google looks for websites that many users seem to value for similar queries. If other prominent websites link to a page, it is a good sign that the information on the page is well trusted. Aggregated feedback from Google’s search quality evaluation process further refines how the system evaluates the quality of information.
How to get inbound links?
- Write great content that makes people want to link to you naturally.
- Link to other blogs and in return you will be linked by them.
- Guest post to promote your business and earn white-hat links.
- Build relationships with influencers to gain high-quality inbound links.
- Use tools to get links from partners and others in the industry.
Closing Thoughts
Your content needs links to rank. It helps Google find you among the billions of web pages, connect your content within your website, give structure to your website, and establish a hierarchy on your site.
Inbound links help your SEO in marketing your brand to more audiences and passing authority to your website. You need to make sure that the inbound links have a dofollow set in the HTML tag to get brand exposure and authority. If the HTML tag is set to nofollow, your website gets the exposure but the site authority is not passed.
It is the dofollow links that boost your SEO efforts. Try tweaking your website with good content, SEO, and links. You can reach out to us for ethical link-building services at LinkDoctor to build organic links for your business.
