Internal and External Links: What Do They Actually Do for Your Website?
Having a website that promotes your products and services online is great. It allows you to reach people who spend much of their time surfing the Net. Targeting them is going to pay off for sure because they form a big chunk of the population today. What's good about them is that they usually have the money to buy the products and services that you sell.
But just having a website is not enough to make the impact that you want. You still have to make sure that your pages are seen and read by your target audience. For this to happen, you need to be indexed by Google and other search engines.
When a page is left on its own, indexing it can take time. But time is usually not on your side when you are promoting. You can surely win the race against it by doing search engine optimization (SEO), a strategy that allows your pages to be detected and indexed by search engines early. In this article, we focus on one of the most common tasks in an SEO campaign–link building.
External Link Building
One of the most common tasks in an SEO campaign is link building by guest posts. In this, you write content for other websites. In exchange, those websites will feature your link in at least one of their pages. Why do this? Google and other search engines consider citations by other websites as votes that ascertain your website's usefulness. Of course, the more sites that cite you, the more votes you are deemed to have and the more useful you become in the eyes of Google. This can result in them putting you on top of the search engine ranking pages, or more simply known as the SERPs. Of course, when you're on top of the pages, there is a bigger chance for users to click on your link and land on one of your pages.
But external links don't really have to made via guest posts. Some web administrators do it this way: they create really interesting content, and then they pitch it to bloggers and journalists. The web admins hope that the journalists will feature the content in the articles that they will write. This strategy needs a lot of persuasion and selling skills, though.
Internal Linking
Besides external links, internal links are also necessary if your website is to do well online. Internal links help identify which of your pages are more important than others. The page that many of your other pages link to is going to be considered more important and will be given priority during the ranking process. For this to work, you have to be very strategic with your internal links. You must have a clear idea as to which pages are going to get the bulk of your promotions effort. You will really have to choose because strategies like this only work when you have focus.
Promoting your website through linking is a good idea. But for you to succeed, you really need to have a thorough understanding of the approach so that you can come up with the course of action.