When it comes to effective search engine optimization (SEO) for a given website, there are many techniques that one can employ in order to increase the ranking given to them by the search engines. In the opinion of a lot of SEO experts, one of the best ways to achieve this is through the gathering of external links, as this is one of the hardest SEO techniques to fake.
But what are SEO’d external links? Essentially, they are created when a website posts a link to an outside website – say that you decided to post a link to an interesting news story on your Facebook page. In doing this, you are saying to the search engines that you feel the link holds relevant information.
But how are external links helpful for SEO? All of the search engines actually index the entire web when you type in a search and, by doing this; they are able to see which websites link to each other. Ultimately, the websites with the most external links of other relevant websites are considered as holding the most useful information. You can see why external links are vital for SEO now, right?
But it is not just the SEO’d external links themselves that the search engines look at – the popularity of the linking website itself is also highly important. This makes it even more important for SEO experts to obtain relevant links based on:
- the trustworthiness of the linking website
- the popularity of the linking website
- the relevancy of the content on the source page as compared with the target page
- the anchor text used in the link
In order for external linking SEO to be effective, the links have to all be from relevant outside sources that are popular amongst visitors.
