Good SEO remains a cornerstone for enhancing online visibility and driving organic traffic to your website. One pivotal aspect of it is the use of inbound links, as they play a crucial role in influencing search engine rankings and understanding their significance can help businesses craft a more robust online presence.

In this guide, we look at how inbound links can help your website’s SEO, why they are important, and tactics when it comes to link building. If you are looking to strengthen your website’s authority, it can be a good way to get started.

What are inbound links?

Inbound links, also known as backlinks, are links that one website gets from another. Search engines such as Google generally view good backlinks as an indicator that a site has high-quality and relevant content, making them trustworthy.

Why are inbound links important?

Inbound links are important as they send signals to search engines about the relevance and quality of your content. In effect, search engines view backlinks like a recommendation. This influences a website’s ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), with higher-ranking websites more likely to get clicks and viewers compared to lower-ranking websites. That said, it’s important to remember that not all links are created equal or valuable to SEO.

Types of links

There are many types of SEO backlinks, though not all are worth taking the time and effort to acquire. Below are some of the most popular types you may encounter when building links to your website. 

Follow links

Follow links, also known as ‘dofollow links’, refer to links that pass link equity. Link equity is a level of authority or value that passes from a linking page to the page it links to. Follow links are considered standard links, as opposed to nofollow links.

Nofollow links

Nofollow links have the ref=”nofollow” attribute. This attribute tells search engines that the linking website does not want to pass authority to the linked page. This means users will still see the link on the page, but when a search engine crawler sees a nofollow tag, it will ignore the link for SEO purposes.

Editorial links

An editorial link is one of the best links you can acquire. It occurs when you are being cited within content as an authoritative and reputable source. This type of backlink often comes from high-authority sites, and they can drive plenty of referral traffic to your website.

Guest blogging links

Guest blogging is a content marketing tactic that involves creating content, publishing them on other websites, and linking back to your website. Guest bloggers can receive credit for their posts and a link to their website in the author byline or within the content itself.

While links from this type of content are relatively easy to gain and can cost little to no money, some can end up coming from low-quality sites. To prevent this, you must do your due diligence before reaching out to the site’s owners. You can review their website manually and ensure they do not post harmful or spammy contact, and you can check their site’s SEO metrics that measure their authority and trustworthiness.

Guest blogging will also likely require you to build lasting relationships with site owners and web administrators, so you can continue working with them in the future.

Relationship-based links

Relationship-based links can also fall under the category of editorial links. However, editorial links tend to be more organic and take less time to achieve, relationship-based links take a lot of time and effort to nurture. This is because establishing trust and building connections is a foundational element of relationship-based link building, and those take time to develop.

Links in business profiles

Building a digital footprint for your business will help search engines consider your website as well-established, especially in your industry. You can do this by creating business profiles on business listing websites that allow you to link to your site. Aim to use the biggest established listing, so search engines will not consider it spammy.

Sponsored links

Sponsored links carry the sponsored link attribute, which can be labelled as advertising. While the link still appears to users, there is no editorial endorsement from a webmaster’s perspective, and search engines may consider these links as untrustworthy because of their promotional nature.

UGC attribute

The user-generated content (UGC) attribute (rel=”UGC”) allows webmasters to signal that websites do not editorially endorse specific hyperlinks on their website. The UGC tag also lets search engines know that there is user-generated content within the link, providing clarity that the link is not sponsored or advertised.

What makes a good inbound link?

Aside from ranking well in search engines, websites need good inbound links as they contribute to building a website’s authority and credibility within its industry. Backlinks can enhance a site’s perceived trustworthiness, and aid in brand visibility and traffic generation – only if they are reputable.

Bad inbound links can damage a website. For instance, if search engines detect manipulative link-building practices or engagements, a website may face penalties or even be deindexed. Low-quality or spammy inbound links can also harm a website’s credibility, leading to a loss of trust in audiences.

For an inbound link to be classified as good, there are a few criteria they must meet. Links must:

• Come from a page with content that is relevant or related to content on the page it links to,
• Come from an authoritative and trustworthy page,
• Have an anchor text that describes the topic of the linked page in a natural way,
• Not have a ‘nofollow’ attribute, and;
• Be placed near the top of the page, and within the body of the page. 

How to get inbound links

There are many ways to get high-quality inbound links to your website. Most link building strategies tend to fall into one of four categories:  

• Adding links: When you go to a website a manually add your links there.
• Asking for links: When you send emails to the owner of a website and ask them to link to your site.
• Buying links: When you send emails to the owners of a website and ask them to link to your site but offer some form of compensation (usually money).
• Earning links: When you promote and create something so interesting and valuable that people link to the content organically. 

You can also consider hiring an experienced link builder, or work with an SEO agency so they will do it for you. SEO agencies often have a team of experienced specialists, a trustworthy network of industry contacts, and a wide range of backlink auditing and monitoring tools. Combined, you are far more likely to get relevant and high-quality links in the field you are in.

If you are looking to gain inbound links yourself, below are some SEO link building strategies that you can implement in your business. Ensure you understand what you are doing before making any decisions, as your industry may have different requirements and you will have your own unique link building goals. The below are simply guidelines you can draw inspiration from.

Adding links

You can add links by visiting someone else’s website and manually inserting your links. Common ways you can do this include:

• Submitting review site listings
• Creating social media profiles
• Submitting to business directories
• Posting to communities, forums, and Q&A sites

Building links on these websites is comparatively easy to do, but this means they also have little value to search engines like Google. However, this doesn’t mean they can be ignored completely. In fact, some professional link builders refer to these types of links as ‘foundational links’, because most businesses have branded accounts on popular social networks, business directories, and review sites.

Asking for links

Reach out to website owners and ask them for a link. This is often also known as link outreach. Instead of randomly picking out a website, you should select one that is relevant to your page or content, so the site owners are more likely to consider your request. Some common tactics on asking for links include:

• Guest posting: Write an article for their website, where you can use it to link to yourself.
• Skyscraper technique: Find an outdated page that a lot of websites are linking to. Then create a better one, post it on your own website, and ask those linking to the original piece to link to your content instead.
• Broken link building: Find a dead page that has a lot of links. Then create an alternative page on your website and tell all linkers to swap their links to a working page on your site.
• Resource page link building: Find pages that list resources that are in your industry or are like yours, and then request your links to be added to that page.
• Image link building: Go to sites that have used your images without proper attribution and ask them to link back to you.
• Unlinked mentions: Ask site owners to turn any mention of your brand into a link.
• HARO and journalist requests: HARO, standing for Help a Reporter Out is an online service for journalists created by PR Software company Cision. Sign up for their newsletter and respond to journalist requests to contribute to their articles. You may receive a quote or a link back to your website if your expertise in the field is substantial.

However, this tactic requires reaching out and asking for links outright, which can be difficult. This is why you should also consider building relationships with people in your industry and offering favours before you ask for something.

Buying links

Purchasing links is the easiest ways to build links, as a lot of website owners are quite happy to link to your site if you compensate them. However, exchanging money for links can be risky. Search engines like Google may consider it to be a form of manipulation when not done carefully, and they may end up penalizing your website for it.

Earning links

Earning links is a good way to receive links organically. However, this is very rare and only happens if you have something truly valuable or noteworthy that other people will want to link to your site or mention you. Typically, worthy content come in the form of:

• Results of experiments (data or statistics)
• Strong opinions and unique ideas
• Industry survey results
• Breaking news
• Your company’s proprietary data

Good link building tactics to consider

Having good link building tactics and practices is crucial as part of your overall SEO strategy. Below are some ways you can strengthen your link building.

Creating linkable assets

Linkable assets refer to content that is strategically created to attract links. These assets can take on various forms:

• Studies and research
• Industry surveys
• Online tools and calculators
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Awards and rankings
• Definitions and terms
• Infographics of all types

If you would like to earn links organically, these may help you reach your goal.

Promoting content

A newly published piece of content will likely not be read by anyone if it is not promoted and has no exposure. Here are a few ways to promote your content for link building:  

• Advertising: An easy way to promote your resources to relevant audiences, provided you have the budget.
• Building a following: Being active on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn can help you grow your following. If you consistently publish quality content, more people will start following you and may wind up linking to your content.
• Influencer outreach: You can research active thought leaders in your industry and reach out to them when you publish something relevant. Influencer marketing is highly scalable, depending on your budget, target audience, and industry.

Replicating competitor’s backlinks

If someone is linking to your competitor, chances are they may be open to linking to you too. This strategy starts with studying who links to the homepages of your competitor’s sites, as well as which pages your competitors have the most links. Once you identify what worked for them, you can create similar and better resources on your website.

How many backlinks should a website have?  

Generally speaking, a good website will have roughly 40-50 backlinks to its homepage, and 0-100 to each subpage. Having too few backlinks means Google’s robot crawlers will not boost the page in SERPs, while having too many may make you look like you have received backlinks unethically.

However, this is dependent on the size of your website and the number of pages that you have. To determine how many backlinks you need to be able to rank high in SERPs, consider the below:

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is an SEO metric for keywords. It estimates how hard a particular keyword would rank to the first page of search engines like Google. It is generally measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with 100 being the hardest to rank for. If your site is new, targeting keywords with lower KD can be a more achievable first step.

Domain Authority

A website’s Domain Authority (DA) is an indicator of how strong the domain is overall. This is not to be confused with Domain Rating (DR), which is a metric from Ahrefs and shows a website’s backlink profile’s power.

DA is a metric from Moz and focuses on the overall SEO performance of the site. A higher number indicates a more authoritative domain. A website with a higher DA carries more weight when it links to your site when compared to a site with lower DA linking to it.

Other factors

Aside from Domain Authority, other factors such as Page Authority, Citation Flow, and Trust Flow can influence the score. Page Authority is the strength of a single page, Citation Flow is the number of backlinks to a page, and Trust Flow is the quality of links on each page. All of these send signals to search engines such as Google indicating link quality.

Internal Linking

The number of internal links a page receives can impact how many backlinks it needs. The more internal links pointing to a page within a website, the more importance search engine crawlers place on the page. Some examples are homepages and conversion points (product landing pages, contact pages).

While building external links, you should also be creating internal links to these pages that you want to rank the highest on SERPs and make sure to use the proper keyword in the anchor text each time.

Inbound links are invaluable in SEO

The significance of inbound links in bolstering your website’s SEO is undeniable. Inbound links from high-quality websites serve as valuable endorsements, and they can enhance the credibility and authority of yours, leading to increased visibility online. As search algorithms continue to evolve, maintaining a relevant and high-quality inbound link profile should remain a cornerstone of your overall SEO strategy.

Contact MediaGroup for an SEO consultation

If you are looking to improve your backlink profile or start creating a link building strategy, MediaGroup can assist you. We have an experienced team of link building specialists who can work with you to boost your search rankings and strengthen your website to potentially increase your bottom line. Contact us today for a free SEO consultation.