Internal and external links are essential for a strong SEO strategy on any website. By using relevant internal and external links, you can improve the search visibility, user experience, page authority, and domain authority of your website and its pages. Internal linking allows you to direct readers to other pages on your website, increasing the impressions and improving the ranking of those pages. External links can also be used to provide readers with additional information on a topic that is not covered on the current page.
Table of Contents
In this article, we’re going to discuss what internal and external links are, benefits of internal and external link building, and the ways to use them effectively.
What are Internal and External Links?
Internal linking is a process in which you apply hyperlinks in certain keywords or key phrases of one page in order to direct readers to a targeted page on your website. If you use internal linking strategically, it helps Google to find, understand, and index all of the pages on your website. It is very helpful to increase Page Authority (also known as PageRank).
Here is a structure to understand the process of internal linking more simply:
Your Domain ———-to——— Your Domain
Whereas external linking is a process in which you apply hyperlinks in certain keywords or key phrases of one page in order to direct readers to another page of a different website. External linking is very helpful in increasing user experience, Page Authority (PA), and Domain Authority (DA).
We recommend you to not use external linking on the keywords you want your web page to rank.
Here is a structure to understand the process of external more simply:
Your Domain ———-to——— Another Domain
Let’s discuss the various benefits of link building for both internal and external links.
Related: The Ultimate Guide on the Benefits of Building Link for SEO
Benefits of Internal Link Building
1. Internal linking allows users to navigate through the current page content as well as the relevant pages of the same website.
2. It also improves your website’s engagement metrics and drives users toward conversion.
3. Internal linking is also important for establishing your website’s architecture.
4. One of the best parts is it improves the crawl efficiency of each page of your website.
5. The building or spreading of link equity throughout your websites is another inevitable feature of internal link building.
6. Internal link building tells Google and other search engines about the keyword you want to rank your web page for.
7. It helps enhance search visibility, PA, and DA of your website.
Related: How to Create a Google Analytics 4 Account & Link That to Google Tag Manager?
Benefits of External Link Building
- External link building improves your website’s credibility.
- It plays an important role in improving search engine optimization (SEO) and helps improve your page ranking.
- External linking is one of the easy ways to create connections with other websites.
- It helps enhance search visibility, PA, and DA of your website.
- External link building offers users more value.
How to Create Internal Links on the Webpage?
Let’s make it very simple and do it with a proper example in WordPress.
Step-1: “Copy the link” of the page of your website you want to link.
Step-2: “Select the keyword/keyphrase” you want to link to another page of your website. Once you do that, a box will appear as shown below in the screenshot.
Step-3: “Paste the link” in the area you see and tap “Enter” on the keyboard.
Bravo! You just have linked another page of your website to a keyword of the current page.
How to Create External Links on the Webpage?
The steps to add external linking are same as internal linking.
Therefore, I won’t take you with the steps we already have followed above in internal linking.
Just to be clear, in this type of linking you need to use the link of the external page (from another Domain or website) instead of your own website and link it with your selected keyword or keyphrase. Don’t forget to open this page in a new tab instead of the same tab. To do so, you can use target=”_blank” on the anchor tag.
e.g. <a href="https://yourexternallink.com/selectedpage"
target="_blank" title="selected keyphrase">selected Keyphrase</a>Also read: The Importance of Online Marketing for Business Growth in 2023
Conclusion
Internal and external links play a vital role in enhancing the search visibility, user experience, page authority, and domain authority of your website or its pages.
The important part is the relevance of the hyperlink you’re using to direct your users. Internal and external link building is an integral part of SEO strategy and you do have to apply this in case you’re looking for getting a good rank in the search engines.
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