Definition

Inbound link or also known as Backlink is a link from the external domain that direct to one of your page. For example you have example.com, and cmlabs.co has a link to your site, so this link is counted as an inbound link.

Google uses an inbound link as one of their sources to measure the quality of your content. When you have backlinks on other websites that have a relevant focus on your main site, it will help you to enrich your SEO and referral traffic.

Function

The right inbound link can give two significant functions for your website:

• It can direct traffic to your websites. When someone posts a link that directs to your website on their website or blog, readers will more likely to click it and you can get the benefit from the referral traffic. For example, when more readers click someone’s links on the CMLABS article, it will raise his/her traffic.
• It will help you to rank higher in SERP. The backlink will notify SERP that your website is an official website of a certain subject. Thus, you will get more inbound links from high qualified sites and authority that can raise your website rank on the search engines results page (SERP).

Link Usage

A good inbound link comes from an official website and uses a natural anchor text. Anchor text is a sentence or paragraph that has a hyperlink, like this (“like this” is the anchor text).

Google understands the context of a link, more general text such as “read more” and “click here” are as worth as the anchor text that is optimized by keywords.