Lesson 4: Internal and External Linking

This is the fourth part of a series of [kastooltip msg=”search engine optimization” tooltip=”The process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the natural search results”] lessons. On this lesson I will be explaining you the methods to do internal and external link campaigns. Linking is probably the most important factor at this time on ranking for a specified term. There is internal linking which refers to the linking within your domain. There is external linking which refers to links that are pointed into your site from external domains. During this lesson I will be referring to anchor text constantly, by this I refer to the text that is within your anchor link html tags.

 

Example: (Anchor Text is Highlighted)

<a href=”linking-example.php” title=”Linking Examples”>View Linking Examples</a>

As you can see there are two more factors to this anchor tag that are in it. The href is the URL where you are pointing the link to. This URL needs to contain a keyword that you are trying to go for. If your links are going to be directed to a dynamic script where you will have multiple variables in them, try using URL Rewrites to make SEO friendly URL???s. The title is basically the title of your link, again try to use a keyword in here when writing these tags.

Internal linking is taken into consideration by Google in different ways. First it will take the keywords that are used throughout to link your site together. Some example of this links include your main navigation, footer navigation, call to actions, etc.

Example:

To link to an online marketing company about page, the tag will look something like:

<a href=”about-online-marketing-company.php” title=”About Online Marketing Company Interactive Utopia”>About Online Marketing Company Interactive Utopia</a>

As you can see we use our keywords to create our anchor tags for our site. Try to avoid using images or JavaScript for your navigation as this is not read by spiders. The best method to create your site navigation is UL lists and CSS to make it look good. Also if it???s an important page, remember to link it from a main navigation and don’t have it hidden. I will go a little bit further on this subject on another lesson.

External linking is probably the most important ranking factor at the moment. This is because the search engines believe that basically the more people link to you the better your content is suppose to be as it satisfies all of this different people. The first thing to remember is to try to get all the links to your site to have keywords that you want to rank for in the anchor text. There are different methods that you can use to generate external links to your site.

A good way to do this is to write and distribute press releases. You can create these ones for different events that you will be sponsoring, or for products that you will be launching, etc. On this press releases include your keyword rich links and use a press release distributor to publish your release. If your release is relevant to the public it will be caught up by different news sites, and when they publish them some of them will include your links on them.

Another good method is to have a blog in your site and continuously write on it. This will create more content on your site for users to read and if they like it they will share it with their friends, or on their web sites. Try to have a way to share your content easily. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla! They all have a plug in that can do this for you.

You can also have a link exchange. This is when you know the owner of another site and he agrees to link to your site if you link to his. This will help you but the algorithm gives less authority to these types of links. The one with the most are the one-way links or links that link to you but you do not link back to them. There are a lot of different creative ways

My next lesson will be about setting up analytics and goals on your site to track your progress. This is very important as you need to keep track if your theories are working. If you see that traffic is going up or down. Or if you see traffic but no conversions. This is all problems that you will only be able to resolve trough looking at your site analytics. Hope that you enjoyed this lesson, please if you did share it below via Twitter or Facebook. If you have any questions or comments please write them on the form below.