Online Marketing Quick Tips: Backlinks, Outbound, and Internal Links
When planning your website, content is king in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but what about links within your content? Links are key SEO markers that are frequently overlooked by small business owners who are unaware of their value, and are unsure as to where and how to build them into their website content. All link types have an important part to play in the visibility of your site on the internet so it’s worth spending a little bit of time to go over them.
To start with, what is SEO? In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is the process by which your website and it’s content is made available and searchable on the internet, enabling users and businesses looking for services and products like yours to find and interact with your website and therefore with your company.
Why is this important? Website content (useful, relevant text, information and images) is of vital importance to SEO, but the three types of hyperlinks on your website – internal links, backlinks, and outbound links – also have an important part to play and getting people to visit the services and products on your website, and then become your customers.
Link Types
Three categories of links should exist along side and within the text and images of your website: internal links, outbound links, and backlinks. Lets explore each of these to see what they do and how they benefit your SEO.
Internal Links
Internal links are those links in your website content that you create to point to other related pages and content on your own website, ‘contact us now’ buttons, links to your resources pages from text on your home page, and home page ‘call-to-action’ banners that link to your landing pages are great examples.
Internal links can be built into any text or media on your website, blog post, or social media post, just by inserting the link to the page or resource you want people to visit.
Why are they important?
Well for a start, they make useful resources instantly available to users browsing your site. From an SEO point-of-view, they help Google search robots that are looking for meaningful links and content find their way around your site, mapping it out much better, allowing for greater searchability for people who are looking for services like yours.
Backlinks
Backlinks are undeniably one of the most important SEO factors, next to your website’s content. Backlinks are links from external pages, websites, and resources outside of yours that link to pages and content within your website.
In contrast to internal and outbound links, most backlinks cannot be created by yourself; they have to be either created by the owners of other sites and media, or they can grow organically if you have great content on your site, but the quality of the backlink counts too, so for instance:
- If one of your partners lists you on their ‘partners’ page as a trusted associated service, that’s a good quality backlink.
- If your website is listed on a local business portal, that’s also a good quality backlink.
- If you website is listed on a aggregated business site, that is a backlink, but may not be a good quality one since these types of portals tend to scan everything everywhere so your listing may not be relevant.
Some backlinks you can create though, for instance, links from Facebook or from your Google Business Listing. But make sure that the links you include are relevant and point to good-quality content, otherwise they won’t have as much impact.
Why are they important?
Backlinks are of great importance to search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. because if other websites are linking to yours, then you probably have something interesting and useful to say about your areas of specialty, which gives you a decent-sized boost to your SEO.
Creating backlinks takes time and effort; sometimes you need to talk to your partner companies and agree to exchange links within your relative websites and posts; other times you can offer to create posts on your own blog that link to your partners in the hope that they do the same, and quite often, if you website content offers great information and is relevant to what you do, it can be picked up through Google searches and linked to by other relevant sites and resources.
We’ll talk more about building backlinks in a future post.
Outbound Links
Outbound links are links that you create within your own content that point towards external sources – in other words, other websites or online services outside of your website. They could be links to a partner’s website, your Facebook page, or some other useful content.
Like internal links, outbound links can be built into any text or media on your website, blog post, or social media post, just by inserting the link to the page or resource you want people to visit.
Why are they important?
According to Google, outbound links don’t have an immediate effect on your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), however, because the internet is essentially a network of networks, those outbound links work to help search engine algorithms determine where your website is in conjunction with other similar or related sites, and because of that, you do get an indirect boost to your SEO positioning.
Links in Conclusion
As you can see, all link types have important value when it comes to the SEO of your website; making sure your content is available to those searching for your products and services is one of the reasons you have a website in the first place, so ensure that you include both internal and outbound links in your website content, images, buttons, calls-to-action, etc.
Talk to your partners about linking to and from your site, and above all, make sure that the information on your website is good, useful information, so that your content gets picked up by search engines, other companies, and by the people who want what you do!
For more information and help with your SEO and link strategy, contact Gleneden Ridge Design; we’d be only too happy to assist!
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