Inbound Links
Inbound links, also popularly known as backlinks, play a very big role in building your website’s reputation and credibility among the search engines and in allowing search engines to easily find you. If you are running an online business and you have not placed link-building among your priorities, then you are like a driver who embarks on a long journey without having enough fuel. Do you consider building inbound links so important?
What Are Inbound Links?
As I have already mentioned, inbound links are also called backlinks. Backlinks are those links found on other sites pointing or leading to your website. The purpose of building backlinks is to enable search engines to easily locate your website, index it and get you on the search lists, preferably among the first 10 to 20 results when people do a keyword search looking for information.
Do you know how many inbound links you have? If you don’t know yet how to get to know the backlinks you have pointing to your website, the easiest way of getting this information is by visiting alexa.com, entering your website URL and searching. Among the results, you will get is your site’s reputation. Click on the figure given to be redirected to the pages where websites that have linked to your site are. You can use the information given to ascertain, if you so wish, the number of links built and the reputation of the sites linking to you.
How Do You Build Inbound Links?
Online marketers build links in several ways. Although the easiest way of building backlinks to many marketers is by purchasing them from link farms, such bought links are not legitimate and they can do more harm than good to your website. I would therefore recommend the following right methods of building your inbound links.
1. Set Up Inbound Links With All of Your Own Domains
By this, I simply mean that your Facebook pages, blog, Twitter account, Youtube videos and any other social media gateways should all have links to your website. Whenever you make posts on these entries, make sure you include links to your website. This can help you in many ways. For instance, if someone “retweets” these links, you get more exposure on other sites. This should therefore be one of your first steps in link building.
2. Ask Partners to Add your Link to their Websites
You can do this in various ways. For instance, you can request your visitors to exchange reciprocal links with you and this means you place them on your site as they put you on theirs. Alternatively, you can place a form on your site for your website visitors, who are interested in exchanging links with you, to put their information that you can use to link them on your site (on say a “friendly sites page” created) as they link you on their own sites. As advice, when asking people to link you to their sites, it’s good to ask them to use your website’s main keywords as an anchor text. Having a keyword-rich link increases your keyword credibility and improves tremendously your search engine ranking.
3. Write Articles and Submit Them to Other Online Directories
This is the most sustainable long-term traffic source. When you write articles persistently and distribute them on other sites, people who read them may pick them and put them on their websites with a link to your site, provided they have good content. The more articles you write, the more inbound links you are likely to build. The more inbound links you build the better for you.
4. Join Forums
When you join any forum, you have an opportunity to link to your website through what is known as a signature. A signature is a favourable mention of what you market with a link to publicize it. This signature is the link that leads your readers to your website. Finally, you should know right from the beginning that link building is a process that takes time and this could be one of the reasons why some online marketers choose to purchase backlinks. But buying backlinks is not the legitimate way of building inbound links.
Apart from just having a link, there are other important factors like the quality and relevance of the inbound links which matter a lot and may not come with purchased links. Take your time to consistently build your links the right way. Building inbound links should be one of the first priorities in your online marketing campaigns.
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