Links are an important part of getting your website seen and ranked well within the almighty search engines. We all want to be on the first page of search engine result pages, but unfortunately this doesn’t happen magically! Today, linking systems and other SEO methods are being employed, ensuring that specific websites pop up when any organic search is done via a search engine. Learning the benefits of both internal and external linking will help you get where you want to be on the SERP’s.
The Benefits of External Linking
External linking is what enables the world wide web to be what it is and to do what it does best, put people and websites together. Without external linking we would all be websites unto ourselves, and that wouldn’t prove to be as useful or as all encompassing as the internet is today. External linking is a term that is used to refer to links that come from one website and point to another. When you have your own website it is beneficial to have others linking to your site, yours being the external link. It has been thought for years that only the best pages are linked to by others, and this is true, who actually links to a bad site? External linking will send more traffic your way and it will also allow you to get a higher link popularity with the search engines, which may earn you a higher overall ranking. Of course, a higher overall ranking is the goal!
You can use external links that point away from your content to other websites. Of course, this would be not so much for page rankings but to help your visitors find their destination with ease. External linking can help with the overall usability of your site or just allow you to promote those that you have reciprocal links with. Those websites that provide the most information in the most user friendly manner are those that are often the most linked to, so don’t be afraid to use external links because this may make you more popular because you are giving the visitors what they want.
If you have more than one website you can always link one to the other. This is a great idea, but remember that you don’t just have to link from one main page to the other. You can use external links from one of your sites to point to many different pages on the other. This will increase your page rank because the search engine spiders will crawl your whole page instead of just a very small section of it. The more the search engines crawl your page the more information it has collected, and this will help you to increase your standing on the SERP’s.
The Significance of Internal Linking
Many people know that the more links they have coming in their direction the more they will increase their link popularity, and perhaps their overall page rank Because of this, many people forget that internal link is also an important part of the linking process. When you go about internal linking in the right way you can not only improve your search rankings you can also improve the usability of your website.
Contextual internal links can be a great way to improve your website overall. You may not realize it, but when you have a high quality website that is filled with a lot of content there are many opportunities for you to pass what is known as “link juice” to other pages on your site. If you have not been using internal linking all along, you may need to go through your website one page at a time determining where you can link from one page to the next. This process of using contextual links will get people where they need to go on your site, and this may actually help to improve the rank of all the individual pages on your site rather than just having one or two pages ranking well.
It’s important when linking in this manner to make sure that the anchor text includes the terms that you want the destination pages to actually rank for. Remember not to limit yourself to one phrase or keyword to link to throughout the website. Instead, change things up, using different key phrases on each page, to keep the flow of the content very authentic in nature. You can use similar key phrases on each page, but always focus on keeping the flow of the content in mind as one out of place words will cue both the reader and the search engine to the fact that you are optimizing the page not for the reader, but for the search engine. If you continue to use the same phrases for each page the visitors to your page will quickly pick up on this, as will the search engines. The idea is for the links to be helpful to your user and your page rank, without appearing to have anything to do with search engine optimization! It is a careful balance, but if you remember to continue to change up the anchor text you should be good to go!
Using Internal and External Linking
The use of internal and external linking is significant. If you are just beginning to utilize links on your website you will find that you are able to quickly and relatively easily improve your page rank. Proper linking takes some if you do it right, because the focus should always be quality not just quantity. You also want to make sure that you balance out the link distribution. If you are only linking to one page that is the only page that is going to do well with the SERP’s. Be sure that you are using high quality internal and external links for all of your pages. When you make a concerted effort to do this you will quickly realize the significance of not just one type of linking, but both!
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