Start reading any blog (Big Red SEO’s included), and you’ll start to notice that certain words and phrases are underlined or set in a different color than the rest of the text on the page. These are called links, and they’re a very important part of your content marketing and search engine optimization strategy. In fact, there are entire companies devoted to the practice of “link-building”—that is, coming up with strategies to get other websites to link to your business website. You see, Google’s search algorithm takes into account the number of quality links from other websites pointing to yours, so links are definitely a big part of where your business shows up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
We’ve talked about why quantity is never better than quality when it comes to links, but for those who are really new to the practice of linking, our team at Big Red SEO in Omaha is here to tell you about the types of links you want on your website and why they’re good for SEO.
Omaha Businesses Need 2 Types of Links
The two types of links your business website needs to perform well are internal and external. Internal links are those that connect pages of your website to one another, while external links connect your pages to other websites. There are all kinds of reasons to include both types in the content that you write, and they go above and beyond simply allowing you to rank highly. Internal and external links are what promote a good user experience, and good user experience is what Google and searchers are looking for in first page-worthy content.
How Internal Links Help Your SEO
Omaha companies take note: internal links may not put you on page 1 by themselves, but they do promote the good user experience that entices visitors to stay on your site, reducing bounce rates and increasing the time users spend on your website. These are both great for SEO in Omaha. Here’s how internal links work:
- They provide more useful information to your visitors. If you’ve been keeping up with your blog, chances are that other articles that you’ve written will link logically to the one you’re currently writing. And guess what, visitors will probably want to read those, too, so you should make it easy for them to do!
- They encourage people to spend more time on your website. If you’re providing visitors a wealth of related information on a topic they’ve come to your site to learn more about, it’s likely that they’ll spend more time clicking and reading between pages of your site. And the longer a visitor sticks around, the more familiar they’ll be with your company when it comes time to buy.
- They raise your search engine ranking. Here’s the thing—one of the ways that Google establishes your authority is by looking at how many quality pages link back to yours, and that includes internal pages. The more pages your website has, the more content-rich your website is, and when you link between those pages with anchor text that’s relevant to your topics, Google recognizes your site as an authority in that subject.
External Links and SEO Omaha
External links are those that take visitors from your business website to another separate site. As with internal links, there are a lot of great reasons to use them, but you have to be careful with them, too. You should only be linking to external websites that are well-known, authoritative in their subjects, and directly relevant to the topics you’re discussing on your pages. If you don’t follow these rules, your website could be accused of trying to manipulate the search engine rankings and you could end up being slapped with a penalty that takes you out of the SERPs completely. Here’s what good-quality external links can do for your SEO:
- Omaha businesses can create connections with other industry leaders. This can end up doing a lot of good for your local and national reputation. If visitors see your business interacting with other companies that they also see as thought leaders in your industry, that reflects well on you!
- External links show that you’re well-informed. By acknowledging things that are happening in the industry outside of your company, you’re positioning your business as one that keeps up with the latest news and trends. And the more quality content you share on your website, the more likely it is that visitors will trust your company when it comes time for them to make a purchase decision.
- They also raise your search engine ranking. But don’t take this point as a sign that you should rush out to get all the external links you can. It’s far better to have fewer links coming from high-quality websites in your industry than it is to flood your site with links to or from other sites just for the hell of it. That kind of link-building will get you penalized.
Contact Big Red SEO at (402) 522-6468!
As you can see, it’s important to your SEO Omaha efforts to include both internal and external links on your web pages. As important as links are, though, they’re only one piece of a much larger puzzle, and that’s where a provider of search engine optimization services like our team at Big Red SEO can help! We help your business get to the top of leading search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, and we’re the only Omaha SEO company to offer industry exclusivity to our clients, meaning we work with only one client in any industry and market at a time. Give us a call today at (402) 522-6468 to get started!