How To Use Links To Boost Your SEO

Internal, external, and backlinks 101

One of the key ways to determine your website’s value is via links. If you get lots of links from trustworthy websites, search engines believe you must have something meaningful to say.

But links from other websites aren’t the only ones that matter. In fact, internal links are probably more important. It’s possible to rank without external links but I don’t believe a website without internal links is scalable. So let’s explore that first.

Creating an internal linking structure

Internal links are important for several reasons:

• For users and search engines to easily find all your pages
• For the authority that is given to your homepage from external links to flow to other pages*
• For users to spend more time on your website

When you link articles to each other, you’re showing search engines that these articles are related. In other words, you’re showing that you’ve got a lot to say about a topic, making your website more authoritative on that topic.

When someone links to your website, we call this a backlink. Backlinks give your website authority. (More about this in the section about backlinks.) Now, when that authority arrives on your homepage, you want it to spread to other pages of your website. SEOs call this link juice. With a clear website structure, all your…