5 External Linking Tips to Boost Your SEO Ranking

Links are an important ranking factor for any website, but external links are especially important for SEO. By building high-quality backlinks from other websites, you can improve your site’s search engine rankings and traffic.

However, not all links are created equal. In order for a link to be valuable, it needs to be both relevant and high-quality. You also need to have a solid external linking strategy in place to ensure that your links are helping — not hurting — your SEO.

What Is External Linking?

External linking is the process of linking to other websites from your own. As opposed to internal links, which point to other pages on your own website, external links send your readers to different websites entirely.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about SEO and you want to link to an article about link building, that would be an external link. Or, if you have a website about cars and you want to link to a review of a specific car model, that would also be an external link.

External linking can be done in a number of ways: through blog posts, social media posts, in the body of an article, or even in the sidebar or footer of a website.

Is External Linking Important for SEO?

The short and quick answer is yes. External linking is important for SEO because search engines like Google use links as a way to determine the quality and relevance of a website.

In general, the more high-quality backlinks a website has, the better its chances of ranking high in the search results. Conversely, a website with few or low-quality backlinks is more likely to be buried in the search results.

External links are especially important for SEO because they show search engines that your website is connected to other high-quality websites. This signals to Google that your site is a reputable source of information, which can help to improve your search engine ranking.

5 Tips to Effectively Use External Linking

External linking is an important part of any SEO strategy, but it’s not always easy to do effectively. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your external linking efforts:

1. Link to High-Quality Websites

One of the most important things to keep in mind when external linking is to only link to high-quality websites. This means websites that are relevant to your niche and have a good reputation.

Some ways to determine the quality of a website are to look at its traffic, domain authority, and content. You can also check to see if the site is popular on social media, has a lot of backlinks, and is generally well-liked by users.

You can also use tools to check the quality of a website before you link to it. Moz’s Link Explorer and Google’s Safe Browsing Tool are both great options for this.

2. Use Relevant Keywords

When you’re linking to other websites, be sure to use relevant keywords in your anchor text. This is the text that is hyperlinked and visible to users.

For example, if you’re linking to an article about link building, your anchor text could be something like “link building tips” or “how to build links.” By using relevant keywords, you can help improve your website’s search engine ranking for those keywords. Google also uses anchor texts to help determine the context of a webpage.

3. Don’t Overdo It

It’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to external links — don’t go overboard and start linking to every website you can find.

Instead, focus on linking to a few high-quality websites that are relevant to your niche. There’s no hard-and-fast rule as to how many external links you should have, but a good rule of thumb is to keep the number of links to other sites relatively low compared to the number of internal links on your website.

4. Make Sure Links Are Working

One common mistake people make when external linking is to link to websites that are no longer active. This can happen if you link to an article that’s been taken down or if the website you’re linking to has changed its URL.

Not only is this bad for users, but it can also hurt your website’s SEO. Search engines may see these links as broken and penalize your site as a result.

To avoid this, be sure to regularly check the links on your website to make sure they’re still working. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to do this easily.

If you do find broken links on your website, be sure to add the “nofollow” attribute to them. This tells search engines not to follow the link, which can help to prevent any penalties.

5. Use a Variety of Linking Methods

There are a few different ways to add external links to your website. The most common is to simply hyperlink text, but you can also link images and other forms of media.

When adding links, be sure to mix up the linking methods you use. This can help keep your website from looking like a link farm, which can hurt your SEO.

Create a Well-Rounded SEO Strategy for Your Brand

External linking is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to SEO. To really see results, you need to focus on a variety of different SEO factors, including on-page optimization, content marketing, and link building. By creating a well-rounded SEO strategy, you can help improve your website’s search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your site.

If you need any help getting started with SEO, feel free to contact our team of experts at Ilfusion. Just give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email at [email protected] to get started!

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