Suppose your friend comes to your house. When he arrives, he begins to explain and says, “I could not find your alley. “I asked a shopkeeper, and he was able to guide me.” If an SEO expert hears this story, his mind may go to an external link! The shopkeeper has given an external link to your house in this story. In SEO language, every time you direct the user to another page of your site through the links you create on your website, you have done internal linking. But if another website directs its user to your page or you link from your website to another page. This article wants to define external linking and its impact on SEO.
What is external linking?
External linking or backlinks include links given to your website from other sites. Let us clarify the issue with an example. Suppose you own website A at aaa.com. If Ded9 links to one of your pages (e.g., aaa.com/something) in one of its articles, you have received an external link from Ded9. Or as another example, all the resources we cite at the end of our articles are external links to source sites.
Types of external linking
You can do different things for external linking:
1. Compiled external link
The best type of external link is when a website links to one of the pages of your website automatically and without any special effort on your part.
This link may have different modes. Including:
- Name your company or one of the people who work in it
- Linking you as a source of information used in the content
- Refer to your website as an infographic designer
- Interview with one of your colleagues in the company
And such cases.
To get this type of link, put a few points on your schedule:
- Boost your content marketing
- Produce evergreen, quality content
- Generate content that is shareable and interesting to other websites.
- Publish content that introduces your brand as a reference and market leader to encourage others to refer users to you or interview you.
2. Ad reporting
One of the external link-building methods is publishing ad reporting on various sites (and, of course, related to the mentioned earlier). Publishing a report can help your website’s SEO.
You may be wondering how to publish a report on different sites. You can easily do this by registering in the forum. Just upload your content and find the sites you are looking for from the list of sites that Tribune works with. Leave the rest to the podium.
3. Write a guest post
You can write quality textual content for a suitable site and link to one or more pages of your site. It will allow you to drive more traffic to your website.
4. Holding webinars
Encourage others to link to your website. For this purpose, webinars can be a good option. Hold a webinar and present valuable content. In this way, websites will link to you to address the need to educate their users.
5. Free version of the tool
Users are fascinated by the tool. Now, what if this tool is free? Many websites introduce free tools to their users to keep their audience updated. The free tool can be a simple tool, such as a currency conversion calculator, or part of a more sophisticated tool available to users for free. Like the Hobspat character builder, which lets you create up to 3 characters for free, or tools that you can use only some of its features for free.
The importance of external linking in off-page SEO
External link building is the lifeblood of off-page SEO. You ask why? It’s simple. Let’s move on with an example. If you tell everyone in a group that I am a responsible person and start defining yourself, how much will others believe? Now suppose your co-workers define your responsibility. Isn’t it more believable? It is clear that when others praise someone, we are more impressed than when the person himself mentions his good morals to us.
Search engines similarly use external linking to measure the validity of the content to which they link. When other sites introduce your content to the user or mention your name as the content source, search engines will give your content a special rating.
Let’s go back to the world of our examples. Suppose you want to embroider a ball gown and look for a good tailor. A friend who does not have special skills in sewing introduces you to someone. On the other hand, another friend of yours, also a seamstress, introduces you to a professional tailor. Which tailor do you entrust your work to? You thank the first friend, but you probably think the second friend’s words are more credible.
Search engines similarly validate external links; sites that link to more reputable sites also get better rankings in search engine results.
High-quality external linking features
As you can see, external linking has a huge impact on external or off-page SEO. In the following, we will examine the characteristics of quality links:
1. External link building from reputable and influential websites
Would you rather link a Harvard website to your website or a regular website? Google seems to think like you! The more well-known a website is in a domain, the more credible its domain is, and the more valuable the link.
Is it hard to get such backlinks? Yes, it’s naturally difficult.
2. The link anchor text must contain the appropriate keyword
You may ask what an anchor text is. Anchor means anchor. Anchor text is the text that is the anchor of your link!
How do you recognize links in a text? There are usually one or more words displayed in a different color, and when you click on them, you will be taken to another page. These words are called anchor text. The yellow words you see in this text are inline text.
If the site you want to link to externally for your site puts the link on the important keyword to you, it will light up! For example, if the link to your site is as follows: “Download your digital marketing ebook” is very different from when it just says “click here.”
Of course, you should be careful not to use the same inline texts too much. Google has launched the Penguin algorithm for such situations to prevent black hat SEO methods and automatic replication of links.
3. External linking from a site in a similar field of activity
If you own a website in digital marketing and get a link from Ded9, it is much better for you than to ask a sports website to give you a link.
We can simulate the situation with an example to give Google the right. If Cristiano Ronaldo approves of someone in football, is there anyone who can say that Ronaldo is lying or questioning that person’s skill? Naturally, Ronaldo can better measure people’s skills in this field than a writer who does not specialize in football. The same is true of websites. If a website that specializes in your field introduces you and refers users to you, Google’s thesis is much more credible than when an unrelated website does.
4. Creating an external link Do-Follow
For links to be checked by search engine crawlers, they need to be do-follow or no-follow. If the no-follow tag, like the one you see below, is added to the bottom of the link, even though the link is clickable, it will be ignored by Google and other search engines.
5. Quality external linking is not from one source!
Sometimes we find that getting a link from site X is easy, and we get the link from it. The problem starts when we do it repeatedly because of the simplicity of the coordination! But will the second, third, and fourth links be as effective as the first? Observations show that this is not the case.
Having 100 external links from 100 different websites is better than having 1000 external links from one website.