What are Backlinks and Inlinks? Are Inlinks and Backlinks Important?
I learned this early on after building what I thought was a great website, better than my competition, and for weeks I didn’t get any traffic. I used all of the on page search engine optimization techniques I could find and I still had no visitors to my site.
I had Google Analytics installed for Traffic Analysis and at first I thought I had installed it incorrectly or something. Well to my surprise it was working fine and I still hadn’t received a single visitor to my site other than myself and a few of my friends I had asked to visit. Now my site had been live for nearly a month and I didn’t understand what was going on.
As most people do when they’re learning I started asking questions on popular internet marketing forums such as Digital Point. The question I asked is, “My New Website – Why is no one Visiting?”, and within a few hours I already had 5 replies. All of them basically saying… you don’t even have any backlinks dummy.
It’s hard to believe but nearly everything I had already done was on the right track in regard to on page SEO but I had no one linking to my site. I had no idea search engines ranked your site according to how many related sites link to your site in addition to your on page content and SEO. In order to be ranked on the 1st page of Google you’ll need to have hundreds if not thousands of inlinks from sites
When another site links to your site it is known as a backlink or inlink. For example, let’s say that domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com all have a single link to domain10.com. There are 3 different domains linking to domain10.com so domain10 would have 3 backlinks. You can check your backlinks by visiting a site with a working backlink checker.
Within a week I had created about 400 backlinks by using the signature field on forums and commenting on related blogs to display links to my site. While I was creating links on related web forums and blogs I began receiving traffic from those sites but still not search engine traffic. It took about 2 weeks after I started creating backlinks for my site before I started seeing organic search engine traffic.
The only search engine traffic I was receiving was from Google for quite some time and I eventually saw some traffic from Yahoo and Live but it was only about a 1/4th of what I received from Google. The more backlinks I created the more traffic I received from referring sites and the better my sites ranked in the Search Engines.
One of the most important factors, if not the most important, in search engine optimization is how many backlinks your site has and what sites are providing them.
Learn how to check your backlinks using a free backlink check from Yahoo, Google, or a 3rd party.
In Yahoo Search Type:
site:http://domain.com/
