Internal and external links:
Internal links are links that direct readers to different pages or areas of a blog or site within the same domain.
External links direct readers to other sites or blogs and link your blog to them.
Why should you use internal linking, ie internal linking within your blog?
The main role of these links is to help readers navigate and navigate your site or blog more easily. This deepens the trust between you and the reader, who get to know you better and can become your potential associates or customers.
With internal links, you give readers the opportunity to learn more about the topic you are writing about. To do this, use your earlier blog posts that belong to the same category.
This gives readers an insight into your knowledge, expertise, and authority in the field. An internal link network can help to make your site or blog fully indexed. It is especially useful for search engines to have a Sitemap that contains all the internal links on one page.
If you use the XML sitemap WordPress plugin, you will get more visitors, because Google ranks such pages better.
Internal links
Internal links are useful because:
- Make it easier for readers to navigate the pages of a blog or site
- They help to establish a hierarchy of information on a given website
- Help spread rankings around your site
You can use keywords in your post, but also in other words, to connect internally. However, be sure to add links that point to relevant pages with valuable content, and by no means just enough to have internal links.
One example of a good internal link structure is wikipedia.org. In any text, important keywords are always internally linked to other pages and texts. Also, building internal links improves your site’s ranking on Google. When you have a lot of internal connections, you make the site will be a useful resource for people who are interested in a given topic and Google recognizes it. Internal links help the search engine to index your blog faster and more accurately so that visitors will find it easier when they type and search for certain words and phrases. In the example I show you in the image below, the Google spider found page A and internal links to pages B and C. The important pages G and D that should be on the site, spider can not get, so he does not know whether they exist, because there are no links leading to them.
These G and D pages have great content, keywords, and marketing, but those for Google do not exist because the spider cannot reach them.
Well-built internal links will keep visitors longer on the site, as they will visit more than one page before leaving the blog.
This is therefore a great way to lower your bounce rate, and a low bounce rate is a sign to Google’s search engine that it’s a quality blog.
To get more information about internal links on your blog, especially their number, you can use the Google Search Console.
There is no recommended number of internal links, but in my opinion, about 10 per page is enough, with the remark that it should not be exaggerated.
Be sure to keep in mind that internal links are not broken links, error pages, or blocked pages, because such things will negatively affect the indexing of your blog pages.
Internal (internal) links are best added to the content of a blog post, although they can also be found in the main menu of the blog (at the top or bottom) as well as in the sidebar of the blog. The plugin for popular and similar blog posts is also an example of building internal links.
External links
External links link the pages of your site to other sites (domains), whether they go from your site or from other sites to yours.
Use these links when you want to instruct your readers to learn more about the topic you are writing about, you can enrich the content of the blog post with links, without burdening the post with space for additional content.
You can use external links to connect with people who are your role models and who you consider to be experts in the field in which you work.
You can enrich your blog with a part of someone’s text, a quote, citing the author, and a link to her or his site.
It is important that external links point to websites with quality content.
Then visitors will realize that you are well informed about the topics within your business. In addition, it also affects the ranking of your blog on Google, your authority, and your popularity.
From the point of view of SEO blog optimization, quality external links can be more important than internal links. In this regard, links from other sites that lead to your site are even more important than links that link yours to other websites.
The more links that other blogs/sites link to your site, if they are relevant to your business and topics, they positively affect the SEO of your site.
The number and quality of external backlinks to your site are of great importance for ranking. Links from sites that are trusted, with quality content, improve the credibility of your site. Sites from which you have a backlink to your site should be relevant and related to the topic you are writing about.
Such links will improve trust in your site in the eyes of Google.
Exceptions here are links that lead to your affiliate offers. This is because, from the point of view of search engines, they have no value. To these types of links should be added the attribute “no follow” so as not to lose “link juice” (juice link) as well as SEO points. This way you send a message to the browser not to follow that link. A good way to build external links is to post guest posts on other blogs.
This can increase the number of visitors to your blog. In addition, for external links, you can use the comments section on other sites, giving meaningful comments with your link attached. When it comes to the number of external links, quality should take precedence over quantity, but the number of such links can be from a few to a maximum of 100 per page.
In any case, use external links only when necessary and only when they provide added value to readers. Make links to sites that are secure and have unique and original content.
Conclusion
Understanding the difference between internal and external links can improve your SEO strategy. You have already realized that the ranking and visibility of the site is affected by the relevant use of internal and external links.
A site that is easily navigated by visitors and search engine bots will be properly indexed. Internal links help search engine bots find other pages on your site.
The number and quality of external backlinks to your site are of great importance for ranking. The construction of internal and external links should be considered in the long run.
Over time, the number of links and their diversity should grow, as well as a combination of quality internal and relevant external links. Your effort and patience will result in an increase in the number of visitors to the site and a better position in the search results.
This approach will ensure the successful SEO optimization of your blog or site.