Inbound links

Quality inbound links provide the “link juice” to get traffic. Cultivating links is the backbone of SEO.

Hyperlinks provide the structure of the Internet. For visitors, the vast majority of pages and sites are discovered through hyperlinks from other sites, and for search engines, most content is found by crawling links and indexing new pages that are found. There are two types of links relevant to SEO:

  • Outbound links, which are the ones on your site leading to external pages, are an important part of the link building process – you should include quality, relevant outbound links throughout your site.
  • Inbound links, also known as backlinks, which are a more significant contributor to SEO since search engines consider them a signal to relevance. Inbound links are hosted by other websites pointing to yours, which makes them harder to create and control.

Additionally, there are two major reasons why backlinks matter so much to SEO:

  • Semantic relevance: sites discussing the same or similar topics to yours provide a “thumbs-up” or a vote by linking to your site. Logically, the more votes you have, the more relevance your page has around the given topic.
  • PageRank (PR), which is a signal of authority exclusive to Google, is shared with outbound links. If a site with a high PR links to your’s, some of that authority is inherited by association.

In the book, we cover more about PageRank, sources for quality backlinks and so-called “super-links”, and tools for analyzing competitor sites.