Inbound links or Incoming links, are external sites linking to your site. For example, site A linking to site B, is an example of incoming link or inbound link to site B.
In the early days of web, search engines used to index web pages based on the number of keyword occurrences within a particular web page. This opened the field for spammers who started manipulating search engines by stuffing keywords into title and meta tags. Search engines being one step ahead of spammers found a way around this by putting more emphasis on off page factors like quality and quantity links to a site.
Why are links important ?
Links are, and will continue to remain an important ingredient in Google’s algorithm for ranking sites. This is because they are one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.
This is what Google had to say -
“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity”
Different Types of links -
One way links – The example given above – site A linking to site B, is an example of one way links – one way link for site B.
Reciprocal links – If site B also links back to site A, then this is an example of reciprocal link.
Three way links – This involves 3 websites A, B and C. In this type of link scheme, site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A. Thus each site recieves one way link without linking to each other.
Onpage optimization, as the name implies, is applying seo techinques on the web page so as to make search engine spiders index it and rank it higher.
Onpage optimization methods consists of –
Keywords – Here it means placement of keywords in the web copy and NOT selection of keywords. Keyword selection is done prior to writing content for web page and NOT as an afterthough ( although this is often the case ). Keywords must be placed in such a manner that both search spiders and visitors should be satisfied.
Title: In the title tag, the target keyword should appear at least once. (different title for each page). The title should entice the visitor to click to your site.
Meta Tags: Meta description tag – This tag summarizes the purpose of web page and like title tag, must include keywords.
The title and description should be appealing not only to the search engines, but to visitors as well. Search engines are not going to buy your products and services. Humans will.
Meta keywords tag – List of keywords seperated by comma is what goes into meta keywords list. (different keywords for each page).
Alt attribute: Using ALT attribute on images is good seo practice. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is not true in case of search engines, but ALT attribute is worth it. Don’t cram all the keywords in one ALT attribute. One or two keywords is sufficient.
Anchor Text: Internal links must be optimized with targetted Keywords.
HTML Site Map: HTML sitemap consists of links to all the pages of the website. This is useful in case of large website as visitor can quickly glance through all the pages to find the desired information.