No high-ranking content exists in a vacuum. In fact, if your content exists in a vacuum, that means it is not easy to find. And content that is not easy to find might as well not exist. Your effort is put to waste if your content is not searchable.

But searching for content is just one way to find it. One more way that you shouldn’t ignore is through linking. There are three different links in terms of SEO: internal links, external links, and inbound links. Internal links are links coming from one page of your website to another. External links come from the source page to a target page outside the website. Inbound links are the opposite: they come from external sources and go to a page on the target website.

Among these three, many SEO in Hong Kong believe that external links are the most important.

External Links Are a Testament of Trust

It’s easy to link to your own content, and in fact, it’s encouraged to avoid orphan pages. You also improve the customer experience and your bounce rate when you link users to more relevant pages within your website. However, external links mean so much more. It means the source of the link trusted the page to be credible enough not just to mention, but to link to.

When you get these external links headed for your pages, it means you’re being acknowledged as a good source of information. Conversely, if you are adding external links to your content, it means you are providing well-researched content that includes supplemental information that may further help your readers find what they are looking for.

On both accounts, you come out as a credible content source.

Best Practices when Adding External Links

Though external links are supposed to improve the credibility of your content, practitioners of SEO recommend not overdoing it. Here are some of the industry best practices for external links:

●     1 every 500. There is no magic number when it comes to links, but a good practice is to add one external link every 500 words of content.

●     Open on a new tab. The goal of external links is to provide supplemental information, not turn your readers away from your website at the first sign of an external link. Open the link on a new tab so that readers can peruse the external website after they are done with your content. This way, your bounce rate does not suffer.

●     Use descriptive anchor texts. Users want to know what they will get when they click a link. When you are linking to an external page, the anchor text should adequately describe what you are linking to.

●     Tag links appropriately. Google recently rolled out more descriptive attributes for each link aside from the “nofollow” tag that you are probably familiar with. Now, Google wants you to tag whether content is sponsored (rel=”sponsored”) or user-generated (rel=”ugc”). These may be combined with the rel=“nofollow” tag to accurately describe the link you are adding.

Linking to relevant pages is a way of referring readers to information that will be helpful for their search. Aim to be the external source of reputable sites, and provide trustworthy external links as well to make your content more credible.

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