Today’s Pulse Digital Advertising Lesson: links. Internal and Inbound Links in particular.

Even though the internet is a constantly changing and evolving place, it does have some attributes that will stick around for a long time. One of those being how the use of links in your content can boost your SEO. We often hear about links but many of us still struggle to even know what kind of links to use. Inbound and Internal links are the most common to use, but what are the differences in inbound and internal links?

A Quick Lesson

An internal link is you linking one webpage on a website to an internal page on the same website. An inbound link comes from one website referencing a page on another website.

Internal Link

While more simplistic in concept, internal links are still valuable and something your website should utilize. Here’s why:

• Enhanced User Experience
  • When a user is reading something on one page of your website but doesn’t understand exactly what it means, it helps them to have a quick reference to another part of your website that explains it. Utilize your internal link structure to drive consumers that generates conversion.

• Crawlability
  • Remember that blog about how crawled pages affect your SEO we wrote recently? And the paragraph above? Well, look no further.

• Reduce Bounce Rate
  • For those of you not familiar with the term, your bounce rate is determined by how much time a user spends on your more than one page of you website.

A website that has an enhanced user experience will let Google Spiders crawl more of its pages which hopefully means humans will also access more than one page on your website.

Google has over 200 attributes that affect how it ranks searches. Even with all those qualities, inbound links are still considered the most weighted relevancy signal in Google’s algorithm. That being said, let’s learn more about the gold star of SEO Strategy.

Inbound Link

An inbound link is also known as a backlink. As a reminder, an inbound link to a page comes from an external website referencing another website. They see the value and know that their users would benefit so they link to you. Receiving an inbound link from a website like Forbes or Inc. is very impactful for your company’s SEO Strategy. The more influential of an inbound link your company receives, the higher your company’s SERP. It also probably means you’re putting out some pretty killer content, so keep it up!

However, receiving an inbound link from any website can be difficult. It can feel nearly impossible to receive an inbound link from a stronger or more reputable website. As simplistic as it sounds, it really does take time, effort, and dedication to build up reason for other websites to link to your content. Part of this comes from producing truly unique and valuable content.

Consistent yet respectful manual outreach to good sources will help to receive an inbound link from them. They will come because you have invaluable content on your page that other credible sites think it is worth to link to. It’s the ultimate dream to have one website see an inbound link to your webpage then use that same link for their purposes. Then another does the same, then another, then boom, off the chart SERP.

Stay Humble

There are a couple things to consider or stay away from when going through the inbound link process. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Buying Links
• Forum Spam
• Blog Comment Spam

None of these tactics will serve as a sustainable way to continue to have external websites to link from yours.

You can use comment sections and blog forums for beneficial purposes, you just have to be smart when doing so. Before posting any link, be reply often and be active in these areas. Make sure you are providing relevant information. After you have established credibility, post a relevant link to your site.  

Create content. Do the outreach. Get the links.

Let’s Talk

At Pulse Digital Advertising, we can help to solve all of your link dilemmas. Start by requesting a free consultation and we will be able to give you insight into the health of the links you currently use.