Best External Linking Practices for SEO
External links, also known as outbound links are one of the essential ranking factors. Have you ever thought - why it is important to have quality outbound links?
Outbound links or External Links are probably one of the most undervalued tactics of content marketing strategy. We all know that links pointing to our website from high DA sites are an important ranking factor.
But links going out from your website can also play a vital role in improving the rank of your website. They help improve the user experience and at the same time – important for SEO.
Unlike Internal links that send the users to different pages on your website – outbound links send users to an entirely different website.
In this section, we will help you learn the best external linking practices to improve your page rank and rive plenty of organic and FREE traffic.
Before we let into details, let’s understand what external links are and why are they important?
External links can be described as hyperlinks to other domains. If any website links to your website – it is considered an ‘external’ or ‘outbound’ link to your website. Similarly, if your website is linked to any other website – it is also treated as an ‘external link’.
Adding trustworthy website links of high quality to your website or webpages will help improve the credibility of your website. Whereas, adding too many spam links or poor quality links will harm your website.
Linking to relevant websites will not hurt the page rank as long as they are high-authoritative sites. An external link is more valuable if it links to relevant pages that are high PR.
The type of external link is a great source of FREE traffic to your website.
Now you have an idea what outbound links are! Let’s check the best practices for outbound linking!
Relevance
When building external links, you should consider the relevancy of the website you are linking to. Check if it an unnatural fit to link to that site. For example – if the linking website is on “health & Fitness” and the source website is “content writing series” – it adds no value to link to such a website.
Popularity
Search engines love to show users the most relevant results for their queries. No doubt, outbound links are a key metric to determine the popularity of a given web page. The more the number of links a webpage receives from other websites – the more popular it is.
Toxic links
Before you link to any site, it is crucial to audit their link profile and create a list of disavowing links. You can check the Disavow or Toxic links on your website by checking on Google Search Console.
Domain authority
Based on the concept of academic citation, external links are considered to be “votes” to another site. The more authority the site has – the more value the link will have to that site.
Avoid too many links
Having outbound links is fine, but having too many outbound links from the same page is not fine. Try to focus more on internal linking and create a few outbound links to websites that are relevant to the topic. Also, take care of the anchor text when linking to any other page.
Avoid link farms
Link Farms are the websites that were created to boost another website’s rank by linking the website from different pages. But it is an unethical practice to improve the website rank.
Let’s wrap it up! Both the internal and external links are important factors that determine the rank of your website.
‘Internal Links’ help the search engine crawlers and users navigate through your site easily. Whereas ‘External Links’ help increase the trustworthiness, authoritativeness and expertise of your content.
When it comes to ‘Links’ – another HERO we need to talk about is the ‘BACK LINKS’.
Let’s know more about ‘Backlinks’ in the next chapter and how they are different from ‘Internal Links’ and ‘External Links’.
