The internet is all about connectivity – linking counts! The way that information is connected within your site as well as how others link to you and how you link to others are all factors that affect SEO,
Internal Linking
- Links include your information architecture – how well your pages are organized on your website. Keep your most important search pages high up in your information architecture. Google factors this in to results.
- Link pages within your site (remember use keywords in the anchor text)
- When you add new content, be sure to link to pre-existing, relevant content
- Don’t create any island pages – make sure there is a flow. Google follows links, all of them should be accessible through your navigation in some way or another.
- Internal links help search engines understand structure of your site.
- Good linking keeps visitors on site longer
Outbound
- Link out to other websites. This encourages links back.
- Again, connectivity
- Providing value by linking visitors to relevant content.
Inbound
- Getting people to link to you – key here is QUALITY sites.
- If the only sites that link to your site are blogs that no one else on the Web has linked to, and my site gets links from trusted places that are linked to frequently, like CNN.com, my site will be more trusted (and assumed to be higher quality) than yours.
- How? You could write content for other sites, partner with another site and contribute content to each other’s blog or newsletter and write useful articles that others will want to link to.
- Create content that people naturally want to link to.
- NOTE ON SOCIAL: social doesn’t count. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram don’t share data with Google. Even though they don’t count as link backs for SEO purposes, these channels can still generate referral traffic to your site. But social media profiles do rank in search engines, AND social media channels are search engines too, but that’s a whole other topic.