All the conversations we’ve been having lately with prospective clients, existing customers, and other SEO experts reminded us to remind our digital marketing blog/SEO blog readers about the three types of links you want to include in website blog posts and pages to support ranking well, and therefore, being found on Google.

Internal Links For SEO

• Internal links are hyperlinks on words found in blog posts or website page content that link to other pages or posts found on your own site, or even to content further down on the same page of the site from which you are hyperlinking (known as “anchor links.”) Notice how we hyperlinked the phrase “blog posts” and pointed ad clickers to the blog section of our site, “Ponderings.”

External Links For SEO

• External Links — Google favors organizations who associate themselves with other creditable organizations. As we shared in this blog post, Google “judges you by the company you keep.” So, you do want to share links within your website content to subject matter experts who provide information directly related or tangentially related to your own services, products, or the topics about which you are writing. The following recently published blog posts are two great examples of our sharing links to relevant, beneficial, creditable, external organizations:
  • https://allintheresults.com/2022/04/18/two-walk-days-and-five-walk-weekends/
  • https://allintheresults.com/2022/03/16/our-favorite-marketing-blogs-and-e-newsletters/

Backlinks For SEO

• Backlinks — these are links that other reputable organizations share on their site that link to your organization’s site. You can look at the Acquisition reports in Google Analytics to see where your referral traffic, therefore, site traffic from external sites not owned by your organization, is coming from. That said, the report will only list external sites which have had visitors click on the link to your site to arrive at your site. Regardless, of whether individuals are clicking on backlinks, Google still rewards you from an SEO standpoint for having these links in place on external sites. Not sure what sites are backlinking to your site? Considering downloading and using SEO Spyglass’ tool. Regardless, it’s always a best SEO practice to keep growing the number of high-quality backlinks to your site, so you and your team should regularly consider what organizations you can outreach to ask for a backlink, then be sure to ask, and then follow up, if necessary.

Since no-one knows Google’s exact algorithm for ranking websites and the degree to which each of the above types of links will influence exactly where your site is presented in search engine results, our recommendation is to “diversify,” and always remember to include each of these 3 types of links in blog post and website content, as long as it feels appropriate — and not too forced — to do so.

Need help figuring out where in website and blog post copy to include external links or internal links, or help figuring out what organizations would be best for your organization to approach about a backlink? We’re glad to help, so reach out today!