Why inbound links are important for seo

And when you put internal links high up on your page, it gives people something to click on right away. Of course, you want to add internal links throughout your page. Yup, this is obvious. And a bug or setting makes their internal links nofollow as well. But because my blog links to every post on my site, that homepage authority ultimately reaches all of my posts:.

Would it be better to link directly from my homepage to important posts? But this works almost as well and keeps my homepage focused on conversions. Internal links help you create a site architecture that it easy for Google and users to find what they need on your website. Yes, many of your internal links will point from page A to page B.

But you also want to link your pages together into categories. But specifically, an inbound link is when you receive a link from another website. The importance of inbound links is related to the quality rather than the quantity of the links. There are a number of things that determine the quality of the inbound link. But this raises the question — what makes an authoritative website. We have a whole bunch of things that we hope together help increase the amount of authority in our results.

You want to concentrate your efforts on obtaining backlinks from recognizable websites, such as the New York Times or CNN. By developing a diverse number of links to your website, you can ensure that the number of different places linking to your website is greater.

You want to find crossovers, such as healthy diet websites or sportswear websites. The anchor text is the text that holds the link together. One of the main advantages of the anchor text technique of linking to another website is that it provides the reader with a description of what the other website is about. The best anchor texts include a keyword search that attaches the website with the specific search term. Now you know what makes a quality inbound link. You already know that high-quality links result in a higher ranking on Google.

But why does this matter? And what else makes inbound link building so important for SEO? The first way is that inbound links improve your ranking of SERPs search engine results pages.

This way you increase the traffic you generate to your website. According to research, the higher you rank on Google, the higher the number of clicks on your website.

See below for average traffic share :. Are they involved with their church? Active in a local car club? Support local charities. Look for opportunities to volunteer your time or services such as feeding the homeless or cleaning up a local highway, for example , and ask if the organizers will add your link to their website in return.

Take part in local meetups. There are 2 common strategies for participating in local meetups. Get featured on local blogs.

If there are any local bloggers who are popular with folks in your area, reach out to them and ask them to write about your business. Join local business associations. These are a no-brainer. Get listed in local business directories. Many cities have local directories to help connect consumers with the right businesses in the area.

Ever since the Penguin update, there has been a strong focus on having natural anchor text in your inbound links. Inbound links are the most beneficial because PageRank gets passed on from other sites to your site.

As the chain of links hops from one page to another, the flow of PageRank gets weaker and weaker. In almost any website, the page with the most inbound links is the homepage of the site. Therefore, if a page within your site is too far from the homepage, the PageRank will decrease significantly before reaching the page. This causes pages that are linked really far from the home page to rank poorly. Since not all pages will get inbound links, your internal links should serve two purposes:.

Normal Site Navigation: Links that are usually located in a top bar menu, sidebar menu, and in the footer that exists on all pages. This is usually built upon your site architecture and how topics are categorized and subcategorized to build out topics and subtopics from general to specific pages. Related Pages: A section of a page that points out other pages that are related to the topic of the page. This is beneficial to users because it helps suggest pages that the user was probably looking for.

User Sitemaps: A sitemap is a single page that links out to all other pages of the site. Based on usability studies, there are three types of people that navigate a site: those who use the normal site navigation, those who immediately use the search box, and those who go straight to the sitemap.

For very large sites, sitemaps can be overwhelming, and in cases like this, the sitemap may just contain the main category areas and not necessarily every page of the site. In-Content Links: Within the content of a page, links can be added to the words within a paragraph. This is under-utilized by many websites, but in other cases, it can also be over-optimized, which can have negative effects on SEO.

Just link naturally, and have the user in mind when building links like these. Always design sites and think of internal links for users first, then search engines second, and learn all best practices on internal site navigation.