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/
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RJ…you are the link building titan! Still sad that you sold the “Bible” (because the new owner is running that site into the ground).
Hey! Thanks for following me on Twitter, that’s how I found you. Thanks for this article too. I had no idea what backlinking was, let alone that it could help your page ranking. I have been doing it some, but it’s time to step up the pace! Great tip!
Help!
I still do not understand what anchor text is?? Is this anchor text ?
Angela (Prime Hydrogen). I put it in the name field.
I clicked where you had an explanation but I got a 404 error.
@Angela … Yah… Angela (Prime Hydrogen) is your anchor text. For the most part, you should try to make your anchor text “Prime Hydrogen” since that what you want to rank for in the search engines. Make sure you don’t do ONLY THAT anchor text… switch it up a bit.
I agree, backlinks are very important but you have to be careful where the links come from too. You need links from relative websites, the more relative and higher PR (Page Rank) those links come from, the better SERP you get in keyword searches
I also don’t suggest using those generic sites promising 3000 or whatever links to your websites. They will cause much harm and could get you blacklisted from search engines lol It’s hard work but really worth it.
I didn’t know you were supposed to put anchor text in the name field when commenting on blogs! And I’m not even sure I can say for sure I was that clear on what backlinks or inlinks are. Thanks for clarifying this. Seems this is one thing that I can get a handle on pretty quickly which should help my rankings. I also have a new site (which is hands-down the best site, bar none, in my area) but which is getting very little traffic to-date (live 4 weeks as of tomorrow). Hopefully that will change soon thanks to your great suggestion.
I agree. You need to be careful you’re linking with reputable sites to increase SEO rank and searchability. Also, don’t forget to include keyword research when it comes to blogging, as this often gets overlooked. Blog content should be original and updated to increase traffic.
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