May 04, 2016 | 2 minute read Link Building and Rankings
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By: Carrie Miller
How many times have you read or been told that if you want to increase your website rankings, you need to add more links? Hundreds, right? So you go, you add links, you get linked to, and still, your numbers don’t budge. How long does the link building method take before there are results?
What is link building?
First off, before going any further, you must understand that links are relationship builders between web pages. These are used by search engines like Google, who in turn will use these links to crawl the web, discovering new web pages, then calculate the estimated audience engagement levels of those pages, and finally determine the relevancy of those pages to searches.
How many links are recommended?
For blog posts, it is a rule of thumb that there should be 3 relevant internal links with 1 or 2 external links. Note that they should be relevant links. Just throwing a bunch of links that do nothing to enhance your readers experience will not help.
External Links
Linking to external sites is good linking if done correctly. It can boost your website’s or product’s relevance, it can boost your website in the ‘eyes’ of search engines, it can even boost your website rankings. Where you have to be careful, is with manipulative types of links – those links that you add because you have gotten paid to link to this page, or have benefitted in some other way.
Internal Links
Internal links – links that link back to another page from your website – are highly recommended. They can really have a positive impact when used correctly. The internal links that perform the best, are the links that are relevant to the article and really take the visitor from a to b.
