By Blastic, 25 April 2019
The Van Dale dictionary describes a link as a possibility to go from one location to another with just one click. We like to make the distinction between internal and external links.
Your SEO score improves when other websites are linking to your web pages. Via the Google Search Console you can discover which sites are currently linking to your website.
However, it is important to build qualitative links. Your reliability (and SEO score) will increase even more if the websites that link to your website are considered very reliable by Google. The more important the website is that links to you, the higher the value of the link. A simple tool to view the external link value of a website is mozbar-chrome extension. After a year, Blastic was able to build up a Domain Authority (DA) score of 12. For Bloovi, for example, it is 48. If Bloovi would link to one of your web pages, it would thus have a bigger impact on your SEO score then if Blastic would link to it.
A strategy that is often used to increase external links is to write a pretty bulky blog article about a certain topic. Smaller parts of the text are then published on community platforms such as LinkedIn, Medium, Bloovi, ... with a link to the original article. A bit similar to what we did with this series of articles!
In general though, at Blastic, we are less focussed on external links today. This is a strategic choice based on two main reasons. On the one hand it requires a lot of attention and time. On the other hand, our experience shows that you can also come to the top of the search results with a limited number of external links. This of course on the condition that you do pay sufficient attention to other matters such as keywords, paragraphs, decent content, ...
In addition to external linking, internal links also have an impact on your SEO score. The big advantage of this is that you have it completely under control. But how do internal links work? Search engines, such as Google, will assign a higher value to pages if more internal links point to them. As is the case for external links, you can also use the Google Search Console to see where your internal links are today.
You can improve internal linking, for example, by adding links to your menu bar or the footer. These are visible on every page and therefore the ideal way to easily multiply the number of links to one page and already is common practice on websites today. Another quick win is, for example, to add a section with related articles, last added articles or articles on the same subject after each new blog article. With many CMS systems this can even be done automatically.
Just as with external linking, the quality of a link is also important with internal links. The more qualitative links are those that can be found in articles. However, do not exaggerate because too many links undermine the quality of your article. If you apply these tips properly, you will not only see that your SEO score goes up but your visitors will also experience an improvement in terms of user-friendliness.
In addition to making links, it is best to carefully choose your link texts. Where possible of course... Google keeps track of which keywords appear in the link text and takes this into account when determining the SEO score. That is why we never advise visitors to click here, but to find out more about Blastic. This link tells much more than the word 'here'.
To conclude, paying enough attention to links will certainly help you improve your SEO score. If you want to know what else you can do to improve your ranking, be sure to keep an eye on our blog for the follow-up article on how URLs and Metatags influence your SEO score!