Link Building 101: Increasing External Links

Jun 19, 2019

In our link building investigation, we’ll now go into how to increase external links. Increasing external links improves the credibility of your site and increases the traffic on your site which ultimately benefits your company. Read on to learn about the two types of external links, what to avoid in external link building, and how to increase external links.

Two types of external links:

In the last blog post, we learned there are two main types of links: internal and external. Dividing links up further, there are two main types of external links. One type of external links are links from other websites to yours, which are called inbound links or backlinks. The other type of links are links from yours to another website, which are called outbound links.

Building outbound external links shows that you care about your customers. Outbound links show this because you’re willing to refer customers to applicable information, even if it’s not sourced from you. (One tip on outbound links, however: you’ll want to make sure the outbound link opens in a new tab. This allows your visitors to refer to another site while still keeping your site up.)

External outbound links also add credibility. If you know where and how to get relevant information, you know your stuff enough to be talking about it to customers. While building external outbound links, consider how relevant the link is to the content on your website. Make sure the link is applicable. There’s no use in building external links if they aren’t useful to your customers.

External inbound and outbound links build relationships and get more visitors onto your site. Linking to other sites and other sites linking to you creates community and an online network. Engaging with other sites encourages them to engage with you as well. This engagement then can boost your placement on search engine result pages.

What to avoid:

While building external links, you want to avoid link spamming. Keep your outbound links to a reasonable number per each article or blog post. Make sure to use no more than 5-8 per post under normal circumstances. If you have many more than 5-8 for a 500-700 word blog post, think about ways to explain things in your own words so that the post is useful, new information, not just a list of links. Link buying is another thing to steer away from. Buying inbound external links may backfire if search engines find that your site bought links. This could be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Increasing external links:

Domain authority can help with external link building. This blog post covers domain authority in depth, so refer to it for more information about domain authority. The domain authority of the site you’re linking to or the site that’s linking to you matters. The domain authority of each site affects your search engine results placement.

Increasing external links must be done ethically. One way to build links back to your site is by reviews on other sites of your products/services. Especially when increasing links by reviewing products on another site, this can get tricky. According to moz.com, ethical external link building can be done by:

  • Not paying anyone to create a fake review for your company or a competing company
  • Not reviewing your own company or a competing company
  • Reading (and following) the guidelines of every review platform where you want to earn reviews

To build external inbound links, make sure your page is valuable. Analyze your website to check for quality and credible content. For others to link to your website, you need to be worth linking to. According to backlinko.com, information that is most likely to be linked to includes images (infographics, diagrams, and charts), list posts, new research and data, and in-depth guides.

Guest blogging on other’s blogs is an option for increasing external links. Google has gone back and forth if guest blogging ultimately increases a site’s search engine rankings. However, guest blogging (with a link back to your own company’s site) will increase your network in your industry nonetheless.

Reaching out to sites where your content would fit well is an additional way to increase external inbound links. If your content would improve the information on their blog or articles, you can craft a thoughtful email offering your material to them if they are interested.

Contact RedMoxy:

Link building is a nuanced subject, but you’re now prepared to start working on your own site. For further link building and SEO information, talk with RedMoxy by visiting redmoxy.com/contact.