Inbound Links… What’s The Big Deal?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Oct 06, 2011
You’ve probably heard these two words in your quest for web domination, but what
are “inbound links” all about really? Let’s get back to basics. Inbound links are an essential part of an inbound marketing strategy. If you don’t have a policy and goal of creating inbound links, you’re not going to have a very successful campaign!
Inbound links are the often overlooked or neglected part of an inbound marketing strategy. Among other things, they improve your SEO (search engine optimization) rankings, improve your public relations mojo, and can dramatically increase traffic to your website or landing page.
Huh, what’s an inbound link?
But what are inbound links exactly, and how do they fit in with an inbound marketing strategy? Well, in basic terms, an inbound link will be an organic link from another website to your website. So when we link to www.siliconrepublic.com, we are creating an inbound link to their website. The word “inbound” will be applied by the owners of that website to the link when it is picked up in their analytics.
But why would you want these inbound links? First off, inbound links can drive high quality traffic into your website or landing page. If another website mentioned us in their blog, it is probably relevant to inbound marketing and therefore the readers will already be interested in that topic. Sending those readers to our website means that they are more likely to be interested in our products and services. So they’re of a very high quality. Good for us, and for our conversion rate.
Inbound links and SEO boosting
Having great inbound links can boost SEO performance. When you have lots of links pointing to your website from other websites, the search engine crawlers take this into account when determining search engine rankings. However, that is not to say that buying lots of spammy links is the way to go. Quite the opposite. Google and her peers are clever and can spot spam inbound links from a mile away. Focus on getting fewer, but high quality inbound links from good sources.
The best way to build a great inbound link base is by providing good and useful content that people want to link back to. That’s where content creation and blogging comes in.
Want to learn more about our inbound marketing services? Contact us today and get started with a free guide to 'SEO: A Beginners Guide'.
