A Strategy Guide to External Linking for Search Engine Optimization.
What are External Links?
External links, or outbound links, are hyperlinks on a webpage that lead users to another website. The goal is to give users more information that may not be on the original website.
These differ from internal links, which are hyperlinks to web pages on the same website (the link on ‘internal links’ is an example of internal linking! Both external and internal linking are important for a well-rounded on-page SEO strategy.
In this article, you will learn how external linking benefits SEO, and how to create and implement a good linking strategy into your website.
How External Links Benefit SEO.
External and internal links help Google crawl websites. Crawling a website is how Google learns what a webpage is about and what keywords they should rank for. That way, Google can show the most relevant and valuable content in its search results.
Including high-quality, relevant links on your web page will inform Google about your value to its users. Google has stated that links, whether internal or external, need to have accurate anchor texts for the best SEO practice (this is an example of external linking).
External links also benefit SEO through an improved User eXperience (EX). By suggesting relevant content, users stay engaged and they get more information on the topics they are inquiring about.
Best Practices
The most important things to keep in mind when including outbound links on your website are quality and relevancy.
The quality of your links matters a lot. Make sure to always link to authoritative, well-established sites.
The links you include have to be relevant as well. If the link has nothing to do with your web page content, then why would the user want to click it? Additionally, it could confuse Google since they use linking to determine what a web page is about. Both of these can hurt SEO.
Anchor text is the clickable text that you link on the original web page. Optimizing anchor text is crucial as it helps Google understand the content better. It can improve the user experience and improve page ranking. When writing your anchor text, be concise, but descriptive and accurate.
If you are looking to improve your external and internal linking strategy or any other on-page SEO, give Vortex Digital a call today at 319.621.0191 for a free, no-obligation, consultation.
