Creating Hyperlinks: Internal vs. External

Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com
Photo credit: www.thesavvysocialista.com
 
Get an overview of SEO basics here if you need to understand where I am coming from on this blog post. 

Internal Linking

When people search throughout your website and go to different pages, they are using an internal link system. This is important for your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You want people to stay on your website as long as possible. It is important to work on linking pages to other pages on your website. This will increase your page rank through the clicks per link on each page. Through this process, your website’s page rank will increase. By this, I mean your website will go up in rank on search engine sites’ results. When people search for a topic and your website is one of the top sites to come up on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine, this is great for your brand. This increases your brand’s awareness because more people are likely to go to your site for information. In addition, it is important to increase your SEO because it improves your brand image. What I mean by this is that the overall image will increase because if your rank goes up, more people use your site for information, and your website receives more credibility or authenticity organically. Because the website is associated with your brand, your brand’s credibility and authenticity increases as well.

Efficient navigation

Is key to keep people on your website. If they cannot search through archives, an internal search engine, or find helpful links, they will probably get annoyed, frustrated, and simply leave your website. This is the LAST thing you want in terms of increasing your SEO. Be sure that there are helpful hyperlinks within your internal network to increase navigation efficiency.

External Linking

This is another way to increase your brand’s image. External hyperlinks establish and reinforce credibility for your website and brand.  Having these external links will not only increase your legitimacy but increase your page rank (traffic). This is where your networking skills need to be utilized. Stay connected and use your brand’s credibility, once established, to have other websites link to your website. This will pump up your page rank.   Amanda explains in her article that a company will allow an outside writer to write articles on their company’s website in exchange for a hyperlink to that company’s page.

Any more questions? Leave a comment. I recommend you check out these SEO blogs too.

Happy Linking! 😉