The Topmost 5 Types Of Links With Examples & Best Practices

In the realm of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are some of the most common and different Types of Links you’ll find across the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet — you’ll even find some of them in this article, you are reading now. But do you know the role (with examples) of how each of these preferred types of links usually works? Well, stay with us till the end.

A healthy link profile of any website involves solid internal linking, several external links leading to other sites, and many backlinks coming from highly-authoritative resources. Initially built as an email solution software specialized in acquiring manual outreach links, a tool like Respona can help you automate the most tedious processes associated with backlinking.

And as a result, this significantly boosts the efficiency of your link-building efforts and other link-exchange practices. When discussing links and link-building, we often refer to the Anchor Text element— the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it’s usually blue and underlined, such as this link to the Web Tech Experts Homepage or other links here.

SEO-friendly anchor text is succinct and relevant to the target page (i.e., the page it’s linking to). Keep in mind that you often don’t have any control over the anchor text that other websites use to link back to your own content. So, most of these best practices will govern how to use anchor text within your website best. Fortunately, your revised guide is here to help you.

Why Website Types Of Links Matter In A Strategic Content Auditing Plan

When it comes to a strategic content SEO audit plan for any given website, there are different types of links that can be implemented in a variety of ways and can take various forms. You’re building a business online, and chances are that you want to compete online for many years to come. If you want to do this, then you need to choose the best tactics carefully.

Especially those you’re willing to use and assess how risky those tactics are. As with any business (offline included), there are tactics that carry a certain amount of risk with them. For example, an offline business may carry out some PR stunts to try and build awareness of the brand. The inherent risk is that a joke can misfire at any time.

While as a result, negatively affects the brand and deters potential customers. As a business, you need to weigh the risks and benefits of any marketing activity. This is why white-hat strategies are crucial to a website: they pose the least risk and are unlikely to lead to you being hit with a penalty from Google.

Also, just as importantly, white-hat strategies focus on adding actual value to the Internet, your industry, and your customers’ experience. If you want to build a loyal customer base that not only buys from you but happily recommends you to friends, you must focus on tactics that give the customer a great user experience. Providing them with genuine, helpful content is one way.

The general definition of a link:

To enumerate, a link (a hyperlink) is a clickable word, phrase, or image on the internet that leads from one web page to another.

In general, there are three types of links:
  • Internal Links – hyperlinks that lead from one page to another within your website;
  • External Links – hyperlinks that lead from your website to another resource;
  • Backlinks – hyperlinks that lead from another site to yours.

All of these links are important for the SEO of your website. Imagine your website as a bucket. Every backlink you get adds link juice to your bucket. Every external link you give out to someone else pokes a little hole in that bucket, causing a little bit of that link juice to flow out. This is especially noticeable if you rely on link building as one of your main SEO strategies.

As a rule of thumb, it’s crucial to avoid having too many external links leading from your website. For one thing, it can throw off your link-building efforts — because any PageRank you’re earning will be instantly given away to other websites. This is why it’s essential to set a policy for outbound links: for example, don’t have more than 10 links from your website.

Similarly, paid links or sponsored links are also a huge taboo, and you should avoid them at all costs. You can measure the impact of your link activities with tools like Ahrefs and Google Analytics. If your traffic has stagnated or even dropped, it’s time to clean up some external links on your website.

The Topmost Types Of Links For You To Focus On With Examples

Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords (Google created a short video to explain that process.) When deciding this, the search engines don’t just look at the page’s content.

Otherwise, they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality website’s link to you, the more likely you rank well in search results.

The search engines use links to:
  1. discover new web pages, which they can then use in their search results
  2. help determine how well a page should rank in their results

Today, the need for quality, relevance, and authenticity has never been more critical. While low-quality, spammy link-building techniques can work, they shouldn’t play a part in a strategy for an organization that is building for long-term organic search success. Arguably, link-building these days is more akin to great marketing and the organizations who understand this.

Perse, they are usually the ones who win long-term. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a technical aspect to building links or that all techniques need to revolve around your product. It’s important to have a good understanding of the Types of Links in SEO that you can build, as well as an understanding of the technical aspects of links.

This will give you a solid grounding so that you can assess the value of different types of links, and work out which ones are the best for you to pursue.

<a> links are one of the most important tags for SEO, and the majority of internal and external domain linking is achieved by using this HTML tag. An <a> link creates a hyperlink with the a href attribute stating the link’s destination, as well as the anchor text which is the text shown for the clickable link.

Here is an example of a <a> link:

<a href=”https://www.example.com”>Visit Example.com!</a>

The anchor text contained within the <a> tag is key for search engines to measure the relevance of the linked-from content to the destination page. When linking internally, you should use relevant and descriptive anchor texts to indicate to search engines the topic the source page is targeting.

Links with commercial anchor text from external websites is one of the core ways that some search engines detect manipulation of links, and this may negatively impact a website or cause penalisation.

Search engines use the text within the alt and title tag to understand the context and relevance of the image being displayed to the user.

Here is an example of an image tag:

<img src=”examplelogo.jpg” alt=”Example logo of intersecting red squares” />

To use an image as a link, you need to embed the <img> tag within an <a> link.

Here’s an example of how this would look:

<a href=”https://www.example.com”>
<img src=”examplelogo.jpg” alt=”Example logo of intersecting red squares” />
</a>

For further guidance on using images on your website, take a look at Google’s image publishing guide.

It is possible to use JavaScript links, however, they’re not always crawlable for search engines so the recommendation is to use HTML links on pages that are indexable. This will ensure search engines can easily crawl content on the page.

One way to create a crawlable link with JavaScript (assuming that a search engine is able to render the page) is:

<script>
var a = document.createElement(‘a’);
var linkText = document.createTextNode(“my title text”);
a.appendChild(linkText);
a.title = “my title text”;
a.href = “https://example.com”;
document.body.appendChild(a);
</script>

A non-crawlable JavaScript link would be a non-<a> link.

For instance:

<span onclick=”document.location=’https://www.destination.com’;”>Link</span>

The main recommendations are to use standard HTML <a> links rather than onclick tags. HTML content should not be dependent on some sort of action or behaviour, especially considering the fact that Googlebot and other search engines can’t execute these actions required to read content the way that a user can.

Onclick links are powered by JavaScript and although they can still be crawled, some search engines may not be able to parse them, meaning that they may be devalued in terms of link equity. For full Javascript crawling recommendations, please see this JavaScript frameworks guide from Google.

The most common use of the “rel” link in SEO is the canonical tag

Here is an example:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com”>

You can also serve the canonical tag within the HTTP header.

For example:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 21 July 2018 21:00:00 GMT
(…)
Link: <https://www.example.com>; rel=“canonical”

The canonical tag tells search engines which URL should be indexed and is a solution for content duplication. Duplicate pages can cause several issues regarding SEO, as PageRank can become diluted between numerous pages. This can happen in several different instances in which you could implement canonicalization.

For example:
  • Parameters causing duplicate content e.g. https:www.example.com?uselessparameter=yes
  • Index.php duplicate pages
  • Protocol e.g. HTTP versions of HTTPS pages
  • Duplicate pages rendering on www. and non-www.

Another type of rel link which is commonly used in SEO is the hreflang tag which is used to serve alternative language versions of a page for international websites.

Here is an example of an hreflang rel link:

<link rel=“alternate” href=“https://www.example.com” hreflang=“en-us” />

Nofollow links can be used to prevent search engines from accessing pages that are essentially a waste of time, which is helpful for improving a site’s crawl budget. Without the use of nofollow, search engine robots will try to follow all internal links on a site. Reducing the number of low-value pages robots need to crawl will increase the chance of higher-value content.

They are explicitly being crawled more frequently. Webmasters can use rel=”nofollow” to indicate to search engine crawlers that a particular link should not pass any equity to other pages and should be disregarded from a discovery and equity perspective. Nofollow tags are a webmaster’s way of preventing robots from following links on a specific page or a specific link.

More so by using the code snippets. In September 2019, Google announced an update to its nofollow directive and introduced two new link attributes.

These rules are as follows:
  • rel=“sponsored” – The sponsored attribute should be used to identify links that are for advertisement purposes, where sponsorship and compensation agreements are in place.
  • rel=“ugc” – As the attribute for User Generated Content, this value is recommended for links within user generated content sites, for example forum posts and blog comments.

In addition, all links marked with nofollow, sponsored or ugc are now treated as hints regarding which links to consider in search and when crawling, as opposed to just a signal, as was used previously for nofollow. You can find out more about this update in this post which also covers the impact of these along with expert insights.

There are two ways of implementing nofollow links:

1. Page-level Nofollow Meta Tag – With a page-level nofollow tag, search engines will not attempt to crawl any links on the page, and will not pass any link authority to them

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Look at this guide to URL-level directives for more information on page-level tags such as nofollow.

2. Link-specific Nofollow Tag – On a link-level nofollow, search engines will not attempt to crawl the specific link and will not pass any link equity to it. Google does not redistribute the PageRank meant for this link to other links on the page (i.e. that value is lost by using a nofollow). Other search engines may behave differently, however.

<a href=”example.php” rel=”nofollow”>sign in</a>

It won’t always be the case that you’ll want search engines to follow every single link on your site, whether that’s pointing internally or externally. Here are some examples where you may want to implement nofollow links:

  • Paid Links: Failing to prevent link equity from being passed from one site to another via a paid advertisement can result in a negative ranking adjustment or search penalty. A nofollow tag should ensure search engines know that the link to the external website is paid and should not pass link equity.
  • User-generated Content: Sites allowing users to post their own articles or content should ensure that nofollow tags are added to all content that has not been moderated and the links included on those pages.
  • Comments: Most CMS systems automatically nofollow all links within the comment fields. However, as a precaution, you should ensure that yours are nofollowed unless you are actively moderating and quickly removing comments with low-quality, spammy links.
  • Sites You Don’t Want to Vouch For: Sometimes, you may need to link to another website as a relevant resource, but you may not want to actively vouch for that site when it comes to spreading link equity. In this instance, you could use a nofollow link.

Types of pages that should be nofollowed

Not all pages are valuable enough to warrant being crawled by search engines, but they may still need to exist for your users. Here are some of the types of pages that typically have nofollow links directed at them:

  • Sign in pages
  • Registration pages
  • Forms that search engines can’t get past
  • Terms and conditions pages

Nofollow can be useful in these situations, however, it doesn’t always hurt for these types of pages to be crawled by Google, as Matt Cutts explained.

Bear in mind that ensuring the site isn’t linking to poor quality content and focusing on having great UX and site architecture should be the priority. So the use of nofollow should be limited. Here’s what Google has to say on the matter:

“A solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.”

Within SEO, link building is vital in driving organic traffic through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex, and the like, especially in competitive industries. Link building can be super effective at driving more organic traffic when combined with solid technical SEO foundations, great on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience.

The Best Practices For Types Of Links To Create An Anchor Text Plan

Within SEO (Search Engine Optimization), link building is essential in driving organic traffic via search engines, especially in competitive industries. Link building can be super effective at driving more organic traffic when combined with solid technical SEO foundations, great on-page SEO, excellent content, and a good user experience.

Today, the need for quality, relevance, and authenticity has never been more critical. While low-quality, spammy link-building techniques can work, they shouldn’t play a part in a strategy for an organization that is building for long-term organic search success. Arguably, link-building these days is more akin to great marketing.

And the organizations that understand this are usually the ones who win long-term. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a technical aspect to building links, or all techniques must revolve around your product. We’ll see that there’s still far more to it than this and far more to understand than ever.

The simplest way to optimize anchor text for SEO is to make sure the anchor text uses descriptive keywords to describe the page or idea you’re linking to accurately. But be careful! SEO makes it easy to “over-optimize” your anchor text by over-relying on repetitive, keyword-rich phrases. In the real world, people don’t always link with the “perfect” anchor text, and it’s often best to mimic this practice in your linking.

1. Understand the actual hyperlink anatomy 

To understand the importance of link building, it’s essential first to know how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what they can interpret from them. Links as a ranking factor allowed Google to start dominating the search engine market in the late 1990s.

One of Google’s founders, Larry Page, invented PageRank, which Google used to measure the quality of a page based in part on the number of links pointing to it. This metric was then used as part of the overall ranking algorithm. And became a strong signal because it was a perfect way of determining the quality of a page.

Each part of a link broken down and labeled. Corresponds to the numbered list below.

It turned out that by incorporating this into their algorithm, Google could serve much more valuable and relevant search results than their competitors at the time. Perse, it was so effective because it was based upon the idea that a link could be seen as a vote of confidence about a page.

For instance, it wouldn’t get links if it didn’t deserve to. The theory is that when someone links to another website, they effectively say it is a good resource. Otherwise, they wouldn’t link to it, much like you wouldn’t send a friend to a bad restaurant.

Below is the anatomy of a hyperlink:
  1. Start of link tag: An anchor tag (hence the “a”) opens the link tag and tells browsers and search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.
  2. Link referral location: The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you’ll see something other than a URL beginning with a # sign. These links take you to a specific section of the URL.
  3. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little text that users see on the page and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue color and underlining, signaling to users that it is a clickable link.
  4. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.

With time, SEOs soon discovered how to manipulate PageRank and search results for chosen keywords. At this point, Google was far more advanced than most search engines but was still open to manipulation because it wasn’t very good at telling the difference between high-quality and low-quality links.

Resource Reference: 7 Must-Know Google Ranking Factors You Should Pay Attention

Google started actively trying to find ways to discover websites that were manipulating search results by building low-quality links and began rolling out regular updates which were specifically aimed at filtering out websites that didn’t deserve to rank due to poor connections.

This has also led to Google discounting several link-building techniques that previously worked well; for example, submitting your website to web directories and getting a link in return. Google recommended this technique at one point, but it became abused and overused by SEOs, so Google stopped passing as much value from that link.

2. Mind your anchor text strategy 

As we mentioned, anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. It usually appears as blue underlined text, but you change your website’s link colors and styles through your HTML or CSS. It can provide both search engines and users with relevant contextual information about the content.

Search engines use external anchor text (text other pages use to link to your site) as a reflection of how other people view your page — and by extension, what your pages may be about. While website owners typically can’t control how other sites link to theirs, “you can ensure that anchor texts you use within your website is useful, descriptive, and relevant.”

Anchor text html example showcasing the types of links

In the above example of the link code, ‘Tiny dancing horse’ is the anchor text for the link. SEO-friendly anchor text is succinct, not generic, relevant to the linked-to page, and has low keyword density (not overly keyword-heavy). If many websites think a particular page is suitable for a given set of terms, that page can rank well even if the text terms don’t appear.

The main types of anchor texts are as follows:
  1. Exact-Match: Anchor text is “exact match” if it includes a keyword that mirrors the page that is being linked to. For example: ‘link building links to a page about link building.
  2. Partial-Match: Anchor text that includes a keyword variation on the linked-to page. For example: ‘link building strategies’ link to a page about link building.
  3. Branded Links: A brand name used as anchor text. For example, it can be a ‘Web Tech Experts’ text linking to an article on our blog post.
  4. Naked Links: A URL that is used as an anchor. For example: ‘josephmuciraexclusives.com‘ is a naked link anchor.
  5. Generic Links: A generic word or phrase used as the anchor. “Click Here” is a standard generic anchor.
  6. Image Links: Whenever an image is linked, Google will use the text in the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text.

While there isn’t a specific length limit for anchor text, keeping your link text as brief as possible is a good idea. At the end of the day, though, the terms you choose to include in your anchor text should consider two main factors:

  • The most concise, accurate way to describe the linked-to page
  • Words or phrases that would encourage users to click on a link

3. Consider target page relevance

As search engines have matured, they have started identifying more metrics for ranking. One metric that stands out among the rest is link relevancy, or how related the topic of page A is to page B if one links to the other.

A highly relevant link can improve the likelihood of ranking pages A and B for their topic queries. Link relevancy is a natural phenomenon that occurs when people link out to other content on the web.

It is determined by:
  • Topics of the source page
  • The content of anchor text on that source page

Links that point to content related to the topic of the source page are likely to send stronger relevance signals than links pointing to unrelated content. For instance, a page about the best lattes in Seattle is expected to pass a better relevance signal to Google when it links to a coffee shop’s website than to a website with pictures of baby animals.

In most cases, search engines like Google and Bing often pay attention to the different anchor text variations used to link back to the original article and use them as additional indicators of what that article is about — and for which search queries might be relevant. This is combined with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and other factors.

Like link sources and information hierarchy — they make up the lion’s share of link relevancy indicators online. To ensure your links send strong relevancy signals, keep your anchor text as descriptive of the target page as possible.

4. Anchor text keyword density

With the Penguin algorithm update, Google began looking more closely at anchor text keywords. If too many of a site’s inbound links contain the exact anchor text, it can appear suspicious and a sign that the links weren’t acquired naturally. Generally, it’s still a best practice to obtain and use keyword- and topic-specific anchor text when possible.

However, SEOs may get better results by striving for a variety of more natural anchor text phrases rather than the same keyword each time. Along those lines, one important note: Don’t overdo it with keyword-heavy internal links. Internal linking is undoubtedly a recommended best practice, but be careful with the anchor text you use to link your pages.

If too many links to a page use the exact anchor text, even on your website, Google might sense spammy behavior.

5. Focus on organic link building

To enumerate, link-building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web. They will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.

Not all links are deliberately built by SEOs or marketers. Many will be created for various reasons, such as a journalist covering a news story and linking to a source or a blogger who loves their new coffee machine so much that they relate to the retailer who sold it to them. Acquiring links that you didn’t ask for is the nirvana of SEO.

It’s always something that you should be striving for and building towards over the long term. You do this by working to make your website link-worthy, whether through a great product or aspect of your service or via producing great content referenced by other websites. Alongside this long-term approach, you can also leverage a range of tactics.

Such as link-building techniques that allow you to build your authority and increase your chances of ranking well and getting traffic from organic search.

6. Creative thinking and link outreach

Every functional link-building tactic earns backlinks by meeting the publisher’s unstated “price” for reaching its audience. In the made link space, we’re talking about supplying publishers with value, such as exclusive news and information, helpful advice, articles that could help them sell more products or services, and useful corrections that shore up authority.

As we discuss value exchange, remember a campaign by the great link builder Debra Mastaler. She offered a client t-shirt to the members of several dues-supported professional organizations. She not only earned links from the organization’s websites (which got to provide a “special perk” to their members) but earned business and, of course, brand visibility.

While a free t-shirt may not work in all verticals, Mastaler reminds us of the most exhilarating aspect of link building: finding publishers who reach your target audience and asking, “ok, what can we offer that they will want?” Creative, entrepreneurial thinking — perhaps you could call it marketing? — remains the link builder’s most important tactic.

How Else Link Building Can Benefit Your Web-Based Business

Not only is link-building beneficial because it can help improve rankings and traffic from organic search, but it also has many other advantages that can benefit your business. It’s also true to say that links come naturally due to other activities where the central goal may not be to generate links.

For example, if you launch a new product that has never been seen before and is truly revolutionary, you’ll probably get many links to your website. Or if you create a great piece of content designed to be the best guide in your industry (and it is!), you’ll likely get links. Neither of these activities will have been done…

Especially creating a great product and creating a great piece of content because of the link-building benefit; links are a consequence of the activity. This is why we need to think about link building not as a standalone activity but as something which connects to other parts of your organization and where the benefit goes beyond the links themselves.

To Master the Art (and Science) of Link Building, you can join Moz SEO Kavi Kardos (watch the webinar) as she explores how the power of off-site SEO can help you increase your traffic and build awareness of your brand. It must be remembered that links represent a vote of confidence from other authoritative brands and websites to your own with these additional benefits:

1. Building Great Relationships

Link building can often involve outreach to other relevant websites and blogs in your industry. This outreach frequently relates to the promotion of something that you’ve just created, such as a piece of content or an infographic. A common goal of outreach is to get a link, but there’s much more to it than just this: Outreach can help you build long-term relationships.

More so, with key influencers in your industry, these relationships can mean your business becomes highly regarded and trusted. This is valuable, even if we forget link-building because you create genuine evangelists and advocates for your business. In some cases, you may build relationships with writers or journalists.

Adding external links provides a better user experience for readers. These links lead to related information that adds to the value of your content without duplicating content. When readers see that you consistently link to resources that’d help them understand a topic better, they’ll associate more value with your website.

2. Sending Referral Traffic

We’ve talked about the impact of links on your rankings, but what about the effect of links on referral traffic? A good link from a highly visited website can lead to an increase in traffic, too. If it’s a relevant website, chances are that the traffic is also relevant and may increase leads or sales.

In this situation, the value of a link isn’t just about SEO — it’s about customers. If you can place links to your website in front of people genuinely interested in your work, they may well click through. Sure, they may not get their credit card out and buy from you instantly, but they know who you are and what you do.

3. Brand Awareness Building

Good link-building can help build your brand and establish you as an authority in your niche. Some link-building techniques, such as content creation, can show people your company’s expertise, which can go a long way toward building your brand. For example, you can publish and publish content based on industry data.

By doing so, you can become well-known for it in your industry. When you do outreach and try to get links to the content, you’re showing your expertise and asking other people in your industry to help spread the word and show others the same. Another critical metric is Moz Page Authority, which is often another early indicator of imminent success.

We sometimes see Page Authority increase even before we see improvement in rankings and share of voice. The benefit of prioritizing the allocation of voice-over ranking is that it normalizes dramatic shifts in time series reports based on ranking fluctuations from low-volume queries. Ranking reports, as we all know, can be a serious roller coaster.

On the other hand, Share of Voice aligns with an estimated traffic model, expressed as a percentage of total traffic for the keyword set. And again, tracking against a control group helps to underscore the value of your content optimization and auditing work.

4.  Identifying Link Targets By Niche 

We’ve created linkable content to support link-building efforts for a client who sold commercial signage. Making linkable content that appeals to many different readers is tricky when working in a narrow niche, and figuring out appropriate topics was challenging. They were protective of their brand and wanted to reach a specific audience.

They also had a particular vision for how their products and services should be represented in our content. We had to scrap several original content ideas, decreasing the number of readers we could reach and sites we could target for links on their behalf. There’s always a delicate balance between serving the client’s target audience and engaging a larger readership.

Giving preference to one audience means making sacrifices with the other, and when creating linkable assets, I’m hesitant to alienate the readers we could reach through link building to hone in on a smaller, more qualified target audience. This means we had to get more creative with ideating topics and considering link-building opportunities — there’s always a relevant audience.

You can use content to connect with, even when you think there’s no way readers would be interested in that niche. Finessing some of our existing ideas and creating new assets from scratch resulted in some fresh and unique linkable content that would be more meaningful and valuable for our client, both in its relevance to their brand and ability to earn links.

5. Relationship Management With Links

Everything you’ve been working towards as part of your link-building campaign has built up to the outreach; it’s the most nerve-wracking step for many of us. But it doesn’t need to be. Some of Aira’s most successful launches have delivered results because we never go to journalists or bloggers with our campaign out-of-the-blue or completely cold on launch day.

Instead, in the run-up to the big day, we’ll work alongside our key contacts and start to ‘warm them up’ (#jargon!) and let them know what we’re working on and what they can expect from us in the next few weeks.

Doing this allows for two things:
  • One: Journalists, writers, and bloggers to make space for your story to be written on the day your campaign goes live
  • Two: Journalists, writers, and bloggers to give you feedback ahead of time on the data, copy, or information you’re sharing so you can provide them with everything they need to write the story up and include that all-important link

When you’re warming key contacts up, it’s also important not to use email marketing or phone outreach — you should try and follow them on social media, especially Twitter, and see what they cover and are interested in. You can also find out what they’ve written about historically and use this to your advantage. This works exceptionally well if you’re doing link-building.

Or rather, if you are doing Digital Online PR Management in specific or niche fields. For example, if you are working with a travel brand, research Buzzsumo to work out the top or trending articles and start to interact with the writers. Differentiate between the pitched links (either “exclusive” or “syndication”) and the ones resulting organically.

When Should You Link To Other Websites In SEO Auditing?

When implemented correctly, an external linking strategy can lead to a high-ranking position for your content. When you add trustworthy and relevant website links to your content, it improves the credibility of your website. In addition, valuable external links provide your readers with references, enhancing your website’s authority.

External linking is similar to how you cite sources in a bibliography for an academic paper—it shows that you’ve created your content based on sound research. The external links you add can assist search engines in determining the usefulness and quality of your pages. High-quality pages usually link to other high-quality pages; thus, search engines will look at your content favorably.

While helping you rank higher, if you link to an interesting article on a critical topic of interest to your business, Google uses this as one way to know what your website is about. Other websites can tell when you’re linking to them. And the chances are that they might return the favor and link back to your website if the opportunity arises.

Essentially, which is excellent because the more quality backlinks you get, the better it is for your website to rank high. It’s an easy and positive way to reach out, make connections in your industry, and get your content in front of the right audience.

Takeaway Thoughts:

External inbound links continue to be an important ranking factor. Unfortunately, link-building isn’t easy — but this class will help you to prioritize your link-building efforts, understand which links are worth going after, and identify a plan of action for manual outreach efforts. You will also find tips on easy wins and organic high-priority link opportunities to go after first.

Like any business, we’ve had ups and downs in organic traffic and have had to defend our work and budget to stakeholders multiple times. We succeeded by pointing out the long-term trends, not the quick wins. In the end, the vision we continued to push forward has resulted in average growth in organic traffic of 104% year-over-year spanning the last 5 years.

It didn’t happen overnight, but our sustained partnership continues to reach new heights. Remember, once you’ve started outreach and the coverage comes flying in for your campaign, if you haven’t been given a link, you can always ask for one in a polite manner. You might get one! We track the number of links earned, the type of links, the domain authority, etc.

Make sure to keep tabs on nofollow links and co-citation links (which we define as links to the coverage of our content rather than the content itself) because we believe all of these are signals to Google of authority.

Answers To FAQS:

1. What is rich anchor text?

Rich anchor text means anchor text containing desirable target keywords. These are often keywords you’d like to rank for. Again, don’t overdo your rich anchor text, as this isn’t how people normally or naturally link and could lead to Google seeing your content as “over-optimized.”

2. Does anchor text matter in the content audit?

Anchor text matters greatly to SEO, as it can indicate to Google what a page is about. Using anchor text as a ranking signal is included in several Google patents. Not using anchor text or generic anchor text, such as “click here,” is generally considered a poor SEO practice.

3. When Should You Link To Other Websites In SEO Auditing?

These are the top-ranking factors Google considers when showing first-position results on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) like Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. Given that much of search engine optimization centers around getting lots of good links to and from your website, it’s essential to learn how to make these links work for you.

Generally speaking, external links are hyperlinks that direct readers to a website other than your own. On the surface, external links seem counter-intuitive — these links take people away from your website. However, it’s one of the most essential sources of ranking power you can ever use. An external linking strategy is following best practices to benefit your website.

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