SEO: Role Of Internal and External Links

Building your brand online these days is not impossible. Even if you only have a dozen employees or you are a one-person team business, you can still compete with many companies found online by incorporating SEO to your promotional activities.

One of the best strategies to improve online visibility, establish brand authority, and bring people to your website is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO can make it possible for you to appear in search engine result pages (SERP). Although it is not an easy walk to the park. To achieve this, you need all the help that you can get. You also need to understand SEO factors like the use of links.

To make your content rank in these pages, you need to incorporate links – internal and external links. Using these two types of links can make your SEO game reliable. The use of relevant internal and external links on your website can make your online presence better.

What Are Internal Links and External Links?

If you are a newbie in SEO or you have been leveraging on this strategy for a long time already, you may have heard and used “links” a lot.

An internal link is a type of link found within your website that directs readers and users to another page on your site. Using internal links in your content can help users and visitors stay longer and help them to navigate within your website. Aside from your visitors, search engines also use this type of link to find content on your website. Without these links, no one can know about a specific page.

On the other hand, an external link is a link found in your website content that points to a page on another website. While some may argue or some may get confused about why you need to lead your visitors to another site, doing so can help you attain a higher ranking. When you use links from a trustworthy website, it helps your online authority improve and help Google understand the niche of your content better.

Role Of Internal Links In Your SEO Campaign

Internal Links Bring Traffic To Your Least Visited Pages

Perhaps you can consider this as one of the most crucial roles of an internal link to your website. It can bring link equity to your pages throughout your site. When you have a page that is usually used by other sites as external links, chances are this is the most frequently visited among your pages.

Incorporating internal links within that page can spill over its visitors, thus help bring visibility to pages that have a small audience. Your linkable page can help bring value to all your pages.

While this can be an excellent strategy in making sure that all of your pages get tractions, make sure that your internal links still correlate with each other. This strategy will also allow visitors to stay longer you website, which is a strong factor to make your website rank high in search engines.

Help Establish A New Page

Doing internal linking is a fantastic way to build up a new page. When you create unique content or a new page in your site that you think can become an asset for your website, build it up first with internal linking before doing any campaign for it.

This tactic will give your new content or your new page an initial boost and help established itself as an authority page.

Makes It Easier For Your Visitors To Navigate Your Site

Search engine bots are not the only ones trying to navigate your site; your visitors also try to find their way within your website. One way to make sure that they find what they are looking for is to through the use of internal link building.

Not only it allows people to know about your less converting pages, but it also helps them find the page or content they are search or discover a page or content that will further spike their interest. Using internal links can also improve your visitor’s user experience and keep them in your pages a little longer.

Role of External Links

Helps Build Your Reputation

Your reputation as a brand is as outstanding as the traffic you get from any promotional efforts that you do—this reason why it is essential to link out your site to trusted to website domains. If you use links from poor-quality and spammy sites that do not provide good value, it will reflect negatively on your site.

Once your web visitors click on a link that leads them to a spam site, they will likely associate it with you and view you as a spam website as well.

Strengthens Your Brand’s Online Authority

Whenever you include a high authority source in your content, it helps people see you the way you want to be seen. As a brand, you want people to see you as someone they can trust and is entirely safe to transact or work with. Guiding them to other authoritative sites can be a good thing as it helps you strengthen your brand’s online authority.

Boosts Your Website’s Relevance

The use of external links in your web pages, help search engines determine the niche of your brand. Links found in your site give out clues about the relevance of your website. Based on the links that you have used, search engines can now determine how relevant your site is to its industry.

Makes Your Site Valuable

If you are wondering whether pointing to another domain can provide value to your site, the answer is, it does.

You can increase the value of your site as you build links to another website that provides informative content. It increases the amount of information you provide to your visitors. As this happens, they will have a positive experience in your site and will indeed a rewarding experience

Improves Online Presence and Visibility

As you add an external link to your site from other domains, those domains will see that you are using their page for reference. This act will encourage them to do the same and return the favor. This action can now form a natural linking bond from other website owners, journalists, industry experts, and bloggers. As they return the favor, this will help improve your online presence, and as other sites link back to your, it will add to your online visibility that can lead to people discovering about you.

Final Thoughts

Link building is an integral part of your SEO campaign. However, it would be best if you always remembered that this is not only about pointing back to your website or directing your customers outside of your website. It is about quality content and valuable information that your audience can get from you.

About the Author:

Maricar worked as a marketing professional for almost a decade. She became part of the biggest real estate company/mall operator in the Philippines and handled concerts, events, and community service-related activities. Leaving her corporate job for good to pursue her dreams, she has now ventured in the path of content writing and currently writes for Softvire Australia - the leading software e-Commerce company in Australia and Softvire New Zealand. A Harry Potter fan, she loves to watch animated series and movies during her spare time.