Links are a sure way to direct more traffic to your website but did you know that there are various types of links, and each has a different value in terms of the SEO potential it holds for your website? The three main categories are outbound links, inbound links and internal links. But it is the inbound links that present the most value for your website in terms of search engine optimization potential. Let’s take a look at what inbound links are and how they can benefit your website.
What Are Inbound Links?
As the name suggests, inbound links are those that are coming into your website from other sites or social networks. Outbound links are links between your website and other sites, or links that you could refer your readers to. Internal links are links to other content inside your own website. These are most beneficial for helping crawlers to index your website content and for human visitors to find content they want and navigate intuitively.
Your website should have a healthy dose of all kinds of links but if SEO is your focus at the moment, inbound links will pose the greatest value to you.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Inbound Links?
Hubspot tells us that:
Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines. Basically, inbound links tell site crawlers that your website is an authority on a certain subject — so the more inbound links you have from high quality, high authority sites, the better your website can rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keep in mind that not all inbound links are created equal and search engines will consider how much traffic the referring website has, in order to determine how valuable your own website is. This means you should exercise some discretion when setting the links up – they are only as valuable as the site you are linking to. Google will check the page rank of the site linking to you, to determine how valuable it is.
So that means that it is not only other websites that can improve your site’s ostensible value to search engines, there are plenty of social media networks and blog platforms that will meet this criteria.
What Is An Effective Inbound Link?
If you want to ensure that you only keep good company on the Internet and link to sites that are valuable to search engines, make sure you link to authoritative websites. Also, ensure that you make use of anchor text and do not over use the links. Rather than try to trick someone into clicking the link (by hiding it within your copy), you should tell people to “click here” or “read this”. You should also be careful not to use too much keyword optimized anchor text.
Is Content Still Valuable Even If There Aren’t A Lot Of Inbound Links?
Links are not the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization. However, they do send a strong signal to the search engines about whether the content is of interest to readers.
If you haven’t worked up to that point yet, Matt Cutts provides the following insights into how search engines rank the efficacy of content:
The first word that’s seen on a page would be counted more compared to the other words on the page. The second time a word is seen it would be counted a little more, but not a ton more. Additional instances of the word would lead Google to believe the page is about that topic.
And while Google would be looking at keyword placement and word usage to determine how accurately your content matches a search query, the inbound links give an indication of popularity. Popularity means your content is being read by online users, and provides a way for the search engines to rank your content.
Of course, it’s not just text-based content that needs inbound links to show its value. Video content relies heavily on this feature, too. So, how can you boost your videos’ backlinks to perform better in search?
Get Backlinks For Videos By Making Announcements
Advertising your videos online is an effective way to get other sources to link back to you. This ReelSEO article says:
By putting out a small press release or emailing bloggers that might be interested in the video you’re sure to get some that will link back to the video. Online forums are another place where you can spread the word. Drop a quick announcement in the appropriate places with a link back to the video off of a relevant keyword and you should generate some interest, traffic and hopefully further backlinks.
Again, social bookmarking has been proven as a highly effective way to get back links to your video content. The social sites you should be looking to for support are sites like Delicious, Technorati and Digg. If you want to submit content for pure link value StumbleUpon is another good one to include.
Understanding The Gray Area Between White And Black Hat SEO
Of course, there are times and occasions when back linking may not be good for your website. That would be those times when you link to un-authoritative sites or when you have too many back links pointing to the same page. Search engines are getting wiser and it’s virtually guaranteed that you will set off the sirens if you over-do it with your links. The purpose of getting the inbound links is to show the search engines that your content has value to others, and should thus be seen as valuable by them.
There are “don’ts” that should be abided by as well. Hubspot tells us that buying, borrowing, bribing and bartering links are not good ideas. If you have to pay for the links, the search engines will pick it up and, if they find too many suspicious links to your site, it is probably going to work to your detriment, not to your advantage.