The process of writing a blog usually takes a lot of time and effort. To write an informative article, the ‘research’ itself may take hours. So it would be horrible if the content published after all this effort ends up on search platforms without much traffic. All we need is to have our content ranked high and read by users. This is where ‘linking’ comes in. As we dive into linking techniques, you will learn how to get search engines’ attention by adding links to your content.
What makes linking so important?
Unless your content has links to other websites and from other websites to your content, it won’t get ranked. It will not appear in the search results unless ranked. So nobody will notice or read your content. If no one reads it, what was the whole point of writing it? It won’t generate any revenue as well. I hope this is enough to make the point clear. Moving on, you will learn about the different types of linking techniques and how to use them properly.
How do anchor texts, links, inbound links, outbound links, and backlinks work?
Since most of us are familiar with the digital world, we would have already come across these concepts. Let’s go through them one by one.
Link
In simple words, links are provided in the content to link it to other pages. Once we have a reader, it’s writer’s duty to walk them correctly through the website. As users can easily follow the pages, it will be a good user experience.
A link is also known as a Hyperlink, HTML link, or href link. For example, the structure of an HTML tag looks like this.
<a href=”url”>Link text or object</a>.
In this example, “href” is an attribute of the anchor tag and it mainly consists of two components.
- The actual link – URL
- The clickable text or object, that the users can only see – anchor text
For example, “I’m proud of my country, India“
Here India is the clickable part (Anchor text) and the URL that guides the user to the destination is the ‘link’.
There are two types of links
- Internal Links – The links that exist between two pages of the same website are known as Internal links
2. External Links – The links that exist between two different websites are known as External links. This can be further classified as backlinks (Inbound links) and outbound links.
Anchor Text
The clickable text in the hyperlink is generally termed anchor text.
< a href= “www.wikipedia.org”>Wikipedia</a>
Even though this is the actual HTML code running behind your page, the user could see only the word ‘Wikipedia’.
How to Optimize Anchor Text for SEO?
The anchor text should be brief and relevant to the page name to which you are linking. In addition to that, avoiding ‘keyword stuffing’ in the anchor text is always considered to be a good practice.
Internal Links
Providing internal links is the best way to guide the readers within your website. Internal links are created for retrieving relevant information from other pages of your website to the current page. Internal links are crucial since it helps search engines to understand your site’s structure.
External Links
Whenever you hear the word ‘external links’, understand that these links are external to the host domain. It links to a target page on another domain from the domain where it’s published. External links are of two types. Outbound links and Inbound links.
Outbound Link
These are the outgoing links that point from your website to other websites. Below the given example is an outbound link.
“I’m proud of my country, India”
Inbound Link (Backlink)
In simple words, these are the incoming links from other websites to yours, that back your website. If a well-reputed website links to your site, your website will get ranked higher in Search Engine Result Pages(SERP).
For example, when we link our page to the Wikipedia website, it is an outbound link for us and it is an inbound link for Wikipedia.