Off-Page SEO: The Difference Between Internal & External Links To Rank Your Website
Linking is one of the most crucial parts of SEO. These are not only the source of increasing trust and credibility towards the website. But also allows search engine bots to understand which sites and links are most relevant to your content. Thus, helping them to better understand your website content and rank it accordingly on the search engine. A lot of experts may think that linking is no more effective when it comes to search engine rankings. However, this is not the case, in my opinion. According to the research,
This shows how important it is to link back your content with internal and external links. Be it content for your own website or you are looking forward to generating backlinks for your content using off-page SEO. Let’s have a quick look at off-page SEO, to better understand how its linking would work.
What Is Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is basically about building backlinks for your own/target website from other authoritative sites. These strategies may include blog commenting, profile building, web 2.0, guest posting, etc. However, the most legit yet influential technique for off-page SEO is guest posting.
Linking In Off-Page SEO
In off-page SEO, you try to generate backlinks for your own website. However, experts recommend including some authority links as well while writing the content so that your content becomes worthy too. Let’s understand internal links and external links in regard to guest posting so that we can see how linking works in off-page SEO.
Internal Links
These are the links targeted toward the same website from which you are generating SEO backlinks. For example, you have written a guest post for abc.com. Then in your content, the following sort of links directed toward other pages of abc.com are internal links.
- abc.com/internal-link-1
- abc.com/internal-link-2
- abc.com/internal-link-3
External Links
These are the links used to support your content & bring authority to it. For a similar website for which you have targeted a guest post, i.e., abc.com, all the links other than internal links are external links. These links could be to your business client’s website or any link to reference statistics or facts.
For instance, in the above example, the article was posted on Learn.g2. The author added a link to Crowd Writer’s blog page. This will be counted as an external link on Learn.g2’s guest post. Similarly, if you add a link for Dissertation Assistance UK, it will also be an external link.
Best Practices For Internal Links
You need to link back to some pages of the targeted website in the content. It is called internal linking, as described already. You can link to any blog page of the targeted website. Internal links can be content-relevant blogs or even products that the target website is offering.
- One internal link must be there at the start of the content, preferably in the introductory paragraph.
- Spread the other internal links throughout the content.
- Put in the required number of internal links.
- Internal links should be relevant to the topic or the content you are writing.
- Make sure that the link and the phrase (anchor text) is matching.
- Do not use links in the conclusion part unless necessary.
- Choose at least two words as anchor text for internal linking.
- In the content of 1000 words, 3 to 4 internal links sound good.
Best Practices For External Links
These are links pointing out some relevant information that you have written in the content. Or some stats that you have mentioned in the content. Here are some points which you should focus on in order to place the correct external links.
- Make sure the reference information is from authoritative sites like Forbes, HuffPost, etc.
- Make sure that the links you put in as external links are of reports, case studies, surveys, or stats.
- For the content of 1000 words, 2 to 3 high-quality external links are enough.
- While linking to the stats, make sure they are authentic and relevant. Statista.com is a good source to check for authentic stats.
- Make sure to include stats at the start of the article. It increases the worth of the content.
- Use stats and studies throughout the article. Spread them in the article where necessary.
- Make sure that the external link is relevant to the content you are writing.
- Do not use external links in the conclusion part unless necessary.
- Make sure not to add any competitor’s links to the target website. For example, if the target website is a pet food-selling website. Then avoid linking to other similar sites. The owner/editor of the site may not accept it.
- You need to be careful when adding links. Do not add links to your/your client’s competitors as well. For example, you are targeting a website that provides professional assignment writers in the UK. Then do not link any other academic writing site in that article.
Also Read: 10 Best WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks
While Summing It Up…
Off-page is an essential factor of your SEO campaign. Digital marketers often ignore internal and external linking elements while executing off-page strategies. However, this linking can be really crucial in Off-page SEO as well.
I hope that this guide will help you utilize internal and external linking for Off-page SEO. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave them in the comments section.
