There are two different types of links – Internal and
External. Every time you link to a page, post or other site, you are creating
very useful optimisation to your website which helps increase your site ranking.
If a page or post isn't important to your SEO strategy, then don’t bother linking
it, but if you have to link it for user experience then use the “no follow”
code so the search engines will know not to follow the link and that way all
the valuable links will be followed. (A “no follow” link can be followed by a
person, but not a search engine.)
An example of using the “no follow” attribute in html code:
<a href="http://websiteaddress.com" rel="nofollow">My Site</a>
Internal Links are links within your own site. For example, one post may contain a link to another post or page on the same topic. Developing internal links is a great way to show search engines the relevancy of your website, as well as assist human reader in finding valuable information. Just make sure that you are linking to related pages and not random pages as this kind of cross linking will have a negative effect on search engine robots!
2 key points to remember when internal page linking:
- Don’t link to a bunch of posts, pages, etc.. (particularly archive pages) from your sidebar.
- DO use a keyword as your link. Having a link that says “click here” does nothing for your search engine efforts.
External links are when you link from your website to
another web site. Don’t link all the sites you like to your sidebar. This just
gives away SEO to the other site. Use external links sparingly and
strategically.
While the links back to your site from Twitter, Facebook,
and LinkedIn may not do anything for your official search engine results, they
can do a lot for sharing useful information and driving traffic by bringing
people to your website. Not only that, these websites link quite high on search
engines so having your social media page resulting high up on search engine is
as good as your website doing well on search engine results. The more useful
your information, the more likely people are to pass it on to others. There’s
nothing like word of mouth advertising.
