SEO Basics: What Is An Inbound Link?

November 03, 2015

Inbound Links make your website stand out prominent in the SERPs. In today's SEO world, more than 95% of the focus is on building quality backlinks.

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology a backlink is a hyperlink that links from a Web page, back to your own Web page or Web site. Also called an Inbound Link (IBL) these links are important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your Web site.

www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/backlink.html

A backlink (otherwise known as an
incoming link) occurs when another person's site links to yours. If
you're trying to figure out the meaning of backlinks, you have no doubt
done some research about getting traffic to your website and seen how important having backlinks is to generating traffic.

It works like this. . . first, you build a website. Hopefully you've created your website the right way by using the right structure and keywords
so that your site is on the right path to being search engine
optimized. If you use the right SEO (search engine optimization)
strategies, you will come up high in search engine ranking.

This means that when someone goes into a search engine
to look for something that your business offers, you will come up on
the first page of the search engine results (rather than your
competitor). So, search engine optimization is important and you need to
keep it in mind as you are creating your website.

Now we get more into the specific answer to "What Is An Inbound Link".
While the structure and keywords are important to keep in mind as you
create and add to your website, the most important factor of good SEO
for the rest of your website's life is adding and maintaining backlinks.
The reason is simple.

The search engines use backlinks
to rate how worthwhile or valuable your site is. If you have many
others linking to your site, that signifies to the search engines that
you have a reputable site that is worth displaying high in the results.
So you move up in rank. While the quantity of the backlinks contributes
to your ranking, it is also important to make sure that you maintain
high backlink quality as well. Try to avoid having backlinks from sites
that have nothing to do with your site. Also, it is better to have
backlinks coming from other highly ranked sites (as long as they are
related to yours).

Example of a “follow” link:

Example of a “nofollow” link:

There
are many ways to go about building backlinks. You can hire a service to
do it for you, but just make sure that you do the research to insure
that you will be getting enough high quality links for what you spend.
You can also do this yourself. It is quite time consuming and can be
frustrating, but it is crucial to the ranking of your site.

If you decide to go about
link-building yourself, you can manually request others to link to you,
you can submit your site manually to the most reputable directories, you
can submit articles that link back to your site to the many article
directories, and you can participate in forums and other social media
platforms so that people are constantly clicking on your link. These are
just a few of the many ways that you can go about increasing the number
of backlinks to your site. Now that you have the basic answer to "What Is An Inbound Link?, it's time to start adding them to your internet marketing strategy.

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