To maximize your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, you must learn about inbound linking and how to get the best types of links for your site. This way, you can rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords, resulting in higher organic traffic over time. This post talks exactly about that, so let's begin!
What Are Inbound Links and How Do They Help You?
Inbound links, commonly known as backlinks, are hyperlinks from other sites that point to your own website.
These are ranking factors that determine whether search engines will rank your page on organic search results and how high. The more high-quality links you can generate for a web page on your site, the higher its search engine rankings will be for its target keywords.
Conversely, low-quality links can damage your website's keyword rankings.
In particular, backlinks generated using automation tools and from poorly designed sites with no traffic and authority put your site at risk. At worst, they can cause Google to penalize your website and not show up on SERPs at all.
But when done correctly and consistently, you can increase your search rankings and sustain them at very high positions. This is why you need to focus on launching a link building campaign to help you generate relevant backlinks from other websites
How Do I Create an Inbound Link?
Now that you know the answer to "what is inbound links," it's time to learn the process of building them for your website.
There are two common ways to get inbound links. The first is to contact site owners via email or social media and ask them to include a link to your site. Either the owners publish an article you wrote with a link to your site (guest blogging) or edit existing content to insert your link (niche edits or editorial link insertion).
The second approach is to either gain author or editor access to third-party sites and publish the guest post or edit existing posts yourself. This happens when the site owner has full trust in you.
There are other link building tactics you can employ here to secure inbound links for your own web pages. The technique you'll use depends on what works best for the site owners.
The Anatomy of a High-Quality Inbound Link
Before you send out feelers to site owners for a backlink to your site, you must vet your link prospects to get the most out of the effort you'll put into acquiring links from websites. Below are factors to consider:
Authoritative Websites
We've already mentioned that the best links come from sites with tons of authority. But how do you measure this, exactly?
Using an SEO and link analysis tool like Ahrefs, you can check a site's Domain Rating (DR) and organic traffic. DR refers to a site's link profile. The better the links pointing to the site are, the higher its DR would be., which makes their ideal link partners.
The traffic, on the other hand, is computed by the number of keywords the site is ranking for, the estimated search volume of each, and the site page's position on SERPs.
Other tools aside from Ahrefs can help uncover these for you. But Ahrefs, alongside Semrush, are two of the most trusted tools in the market that provide the most up-to-date and accurate data online.
Keep in mind, however, that the data these tools will give you are just estimates of the gathered information. At the same time, unless you have direct access to a site's Google Search Console and Analytics data, this is the best you'll get in understanding how authoritative a website is.
Dofollow Link
A dofollow link helps facilitate the flow of "link juice" or authority from one site to another. So, if you get this link type from a high DR site, expect to increase your site's search rankings sooner.
Prioritize getting dofollow links over nofollow links, which don't pass link juice. While Google now considers nofollow backlinks as hints to determine site rankings, dofollow links are much more effective in helping your site rank higher.
To determine if the website uses the nofollow tag on its oubound links, use the Nofollow Chrome extension. It tags nofollow links with a red-dotted box.
That said, it's impossible to get dofollow links on all your link building efforts. Also, having 100% dofollow backlinks makes your link profile look unnatural. Even the best and most authoritative websites have a healthy mix of nofollow backlinks in their profile.
Anchor Text
This refers to the clickable words or phrases that link to the page on your site.
Ideally, you want to use your page's target keyword as the anchor text for the page. At the same time, you can't use the same exact match anchor text on all your links. You need to mix up partial match anchor texts to make the links look as natural as possible.
Inbound Link Building Strategies
Knowing the variables affecting the effectiveness of inbound links, you must devise a strategy to generate more high-quality backlinks to your site. Below is a step-by-step process you can follow on how to get inbound links that can grow your organic traffic:
Run a Competitive Backlink Analysis
The first you must do is look for referring domains your competitors have that you don't.
But if you don't know who your direct competitors are, enter your site on Ahrefs' Site Explorer, then go to Organic search > Organic competitors. This shows websites that rank for search terms that you're also ranking for. The higher the share percentage, the more you should consider them as competitors.
From the list, choose the top sites whose link profile you want to analyze. Click on the drop-down arrow and choose Backlink profile > Referring domains. The next page shows you your competitor's top backlinks based on various factors.
This page also shows you what page from the site your competitor got a link from and how they acquired it. From here, you can replicate your competitor's link by reverse-engineering the process.
Remember that the referring domains show all the backlinks a website has from a domain. It doesn't filter out the domains where you already have links from. That means you must manually check if you already have the link on your site. To skip this step, Ahrefs on higher plans can use the Link Intersect feature.
Identify Prospects
From the Referring domain page, you can filter domains based on various metrics. For example, you can set the results to sites with at least DR 50, 1 million organic traffic, and dofollow links.
This is important since you want to secure backlinks from only the best sites. You can change the filters to lower the DR and traffic limit to show more results if the initial filters didn't show any domains.
Of course, you have to manually check each website. You don't want to rely solely on SEO metrics--looking at the site's layout, content, and loading speed should also factor into your decision to acquire a link from the site.
Create Linkworthy Content
During your research, you'll notice that most of the backlinks your competitor built hinge on content that's useful to the audience. Creating articles that provide value to people about a topic increases a website's chance of getting backlinks, even if they don't ask for them.
In this case, you want to create the same, if not better, type of content your competitor has on its site. You can identify these pages by using Ahrefs and going to Pages > Best by links.
Click on the page and review its content. Since you want to create a much better version of this content, look for opportunities to capitalize on it. Examples include:
- Updating old information, i.e., using more recent examples, citing new statistics, etc.
- Having a much better-looking layout on your website.
- Making your content much easier to read using short sentences and paragraphs.
- Designing better custom graphics using Canva or similar.
- Optimizing your content for similar keywords using tools like Surfer SEO.
Conduct Outreach
Of course, just because you have much better content on your website doesn't automatically mean websites will start linking back to you. Unless you have a very popular site, chances are not many people know your site, article, or blog post exists. So, you must let them know about it by reaching out to them.
Get your link prospects' contact information using a tool like Hunter. It shows the best people to reach out to and their respective email addresses. Determine which among the scraped content details you should reach out to with your content.
Next, send a cold email to get them to link to your content. This will be tricky since you can't just ask people to link to your page without any prior engagement with them. If so, they'll just ignore your email.
In this case, you want to provide value to site owners to increase your chances of getting a reply. That's why guest blogging remains a very popular link building tactic because people receive well-written content that they can publish for free on their site. In return, you can insert a link to your website in the content.
Instead of sending emails manually, you can use software like Lemlist to automate the process. You can send emails in bulk and action-triggered follow-ups with a few clicks of a button. It also has email templates, so you can just edit it to your specifications.
Monitor Acquired Backlinks
Once you've built inbound links from relevant sites, you must determine the best-linking sites so far. Check your site's referring domains and filter the results to show the high-authority sites from the list.
This is important because some site owners may remove your link from the page without warning. By monitoring them in real time, you can immediately act upon them. Email the website owner requesting to get your link back up. Swiftly recovering them allows you to maintain your high search rankings.
Frequently Asked Questions
As a recap, below are answers to the most common questions about inbound links.
What Is an Inbound Link?
Inbound links are hypertexts from third-party sites that point to yours. That said, there's no such thing as a "backlinks vs inbound links" debate, as they're both the same thing.
What Is an Example of an Inbound Link?
In the image above, the post at Backlinko about skyscraper content has an outbound link to a post on Helpscout. In the case of Helpscout, it has an inbound link from Backlino.
What Are Inbound Links & How to Build Them?
We've already discussed the inbound links meaning is. To build inbound links, you must develop and execute a strategy consisting of common link building tactics, like broken links, guest blogging, and others.
At the same time, you must acquire good inbound links, which you can get from sites with high domain authority or domain rating and high organic traffic. By getting links from high-authority and relevant websites, you can increase your site's ranking on Google search.
how to get more links to your website
Conclusion
Inbound links are an indispensable part of your SEO strategy. It's not enough to have great content--you need backlinks from authoritative web pages for search spiders to trust your site and increase its rankings. Hopefully, this post will encourage you to build high-quality inbound links to grow your site's organic referral traffic sustainably.
To get you started, you can hire any of Legiit's link builders to get your link building strategy and campaign going. Our professionals will ethically build dofollow backlinks on high-authority websites to help your site rank on top of search results. Check the reviews and star ratings of each freelancer to help you decide the best person to build links for you.
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