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Why Links Matter: Best Practices for Outgoing and Internal Links
One critical element to achieving your website objectives, including both findability and excellent user experience (or UX), is your link strategy. Both the scope and your execution of that strategy help achieve those goals. Your digital link-building strategy should cover three types of links:
- Inbound: links from other domains that lead to a page of content or resource on your domain
- Outbound: links you place in your domain’s content that lead to content on other domains
- Internal: links contained in your own content that lead to another page of content on that same domain (i.e., yours)
Most resources on link building focus on building incoming links to your domain, which makes sense since those are the kind of links that most directly impact SEO and search rankings. This guide is intended to show why and to what extent search engines consider the other two kinds of links — outgoing and internal — important parts of your digital presence strategy and to offer best practices for building and placing those links.
Why Outgoing and Internal Links Matter
You might have read somewhere that linking out is bad, somehow — that it takes users off your site and they won’t return, or that too…
