This past week I’ve had several discussions with clients and on behalf of clients about inbound links. I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs how your social media plan must be a holistic approach. Everything is inter-related and all the different parts contribute to the whole. I know that inbound links was one of the concepts that I had a hard time wrapping my head around when I first started doing social media marketing and it is one thing that is just not obvious to a lot of people.
A link is simply a hyperlink form one web page to another web page. This is a link to my blog about how content is king in your social media marketing strategy. Here is a hyperlink to another website and a great webinar about link building strategies You should really watch this webinar. The thing is that search engines search websites and blogs and note the links. Some estimate that inbound links account for up to 75% of a websites SEO authority. What importance do search engines give to inbound links?
- Every inbound link is a vote of confidence for your website
- Links indicate where conversations are taking place
- Links convey importance, popularity, value, trustworthiness and relevance for your site
The idea is if someone else is pointing to your site with a link they are saying in essence that the information on the other end of the link is important and relevant. Just as my link to the webinar above. I think it is important and I am telling you and the search engine to go there. This makes the site with the webinar a bit more relevant and when someone types in “link building strategies” for a search the website I linked to has a bit more authority and it will rank higher on the search. When we link to other sites it helps them and when they link to us it helps us. Our link to other parts of our website helps us. This is a slow process but it is very valuable and pays off in increased SEO value in the long run.
Inbound Links Increases Web Traffic
According to a study by Hubspot small business websites that blog have 97% more inbound links then websites that do not blog. The reason is that blogs create valuable content. When others want to connect to your information they put links in their blogs and this raises the SEO value of your website. This is where I had some problems recently with a web site where one of my clients was a guest blogger. After publishing the guest blogs on the other website we made an effort to promote them on Facebook, in LinkedIn, on Twitter and on my client’s website. After a few weeks the other site moved the blogs to a single page. This caused several problems. All of our links were now broken. Anyone following the links will now arrive at a “URL NOT FOUND” page. This was annoying to us but the real problem was for the other site. Any benefit they may have gained from the links we established to their site are now gone. The search engines are no longer giving their site the benefit of our links. They have lost SEO authority. As I mentioned above it takes a while to build SEO authority and the last thing you want to do is throw it away.
There is a lot to cover when it comes to inbound links and it is impossible to cover it all in a few blogs. In my next blog I’ll list some best practices. If you have any questions about inbound links or how they would work on your website contact us for a free website and social media evaluation.
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