External links for SEO are a great way to add value to your content. They help Google recognize your site as a legitimate source of information and boost your ranking in SERPs. External links also improve user experience, as users who type in a search query want to see the most relevant results for their questions.
Whether you are a small, medium, or large business or building a website to support a side hustle or hobby, you will eventually need to master Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or find someone who does.
Building external links for SEO is just one piece of the SEO puzzle – a puzzle containing more pieces than most hobbyists can handle at once. Let’s take a look at how you can start using external links to efficiently kickstart your SEO campaign.
External Link Building
Link building is a crucial component of SEO that improves your search rankings and traffic. It also increases the trustworthiness of your website by demonstrating your expertise and credibility in a specific field.
The most natural way to build links is through excellent content. This content will naturally attract people to share it on other sites or direct users to your website if they like what they see. If you need more confidence in creating high-quality content or more time and resources, there are other ways to get external links.
Broken link building is a powerful tool that can help you reclaim links to your website that have been lost due to broken URLs. It’s a simple process of finding and contacting websites that have unlinked mentions or aren’t pointing to your site and recommending they link to your content instead.
External links and SEO are essential to any SEO ranking strategy and have been a ranking factor since 1998. But it’s critical to know how to build them correctly.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is a part of the link that users see. It gives search engines a big clue about the linked page’s content and helps them understand its relevance.
Anchor text can also help Google to categorize your content better. Using different words to describe your page can increase its relevancy. All external links for SEO should have well-configured anchor text. If several websites use similar anchor text for the same page, this can improve their ranking for related keywords.
The anchor text is usually visible on the clickable link and consists of a word or phrase indicating the linked page’s content. It should be descriptive and provide precise information about the linked page so users can understand what to expect when they click on it. If the anchor text is inappropriate, it can lead to a poor user experience and an increased bounce rate.
Relevance
Relevance is a search engine’s ability to match search inquiries with web pages and websites. This is done through algorithms that evaluate how well a website matches the user’s search query.
Google’s relevance algorithm is constantly improving and has a lot of criteria to evaluate content against. This is why it’s essential to regularly assess your entire site’s relevancy for searches.
Keeping your content relevant isn’t just about keywords – it’s also about providing information users want. Using terms and topics related to your business’s goals is essential for establishing relevance.
Linking to other relevant content is also a great way to provide appropriate resources for your readers and build your authority online. However, you should continually assess the credibility of the sites you’re linking to before you add them to your content.
Authority
Obtaining external links to your site is an integral part of SEO. The quality and quantity of the external links that you receive matter.
Adding trustworthy and informative website links related to your content but not spam-like can improve your site’s authority and help Google understand what you’re about. However, obtaining too many low-quality links can hurt your rankings.
The concept of topical authority has existed since the early days of search engines. It means that a website must have a lot of coverage on a specific subject and reference things within their Ontology, hierarchy, and context.
Aside from page rank, domain authority is also an essential metric for SEO.
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