These are the two main categories of links you can see on a website:
- Internal links, pointing to another page on your website, create SEO value by establishing an information hierarchy and spreading link equity (ranking power)
- External links point to external sources from your website, supporting and validating your claims (e.g. referring to research or the source of a quote)
What is link equity?
Imagine that one of your pages starts ranking well. If that page is connected to another via an internal link, the first well-performing page can pass through that ranking power to the other page, helping it perform better in search.
This is why it’s a good idea to occasionally link from your informational content to your product, service, or webshop pages that are optimized for conversion, a.k.a. where you want people to buy something. Both can find a good position in Google if one of them does.
✨ Extra tip: Publishing a new content piece on your site is never complete until you link to it from another, already live post. Also, make sure to internally link as many posts as possible, dictated by common sense, of course.
| How can I quickly find other relevant pages to link to and from within my site? Use the following Google search operator filled in with your relevant text in the search box: site:URL “keyword” – no space after “site” – you can add space after the URL – when using more than one word, put them in quotation marks to find the exact phrase on another page Example ✍️ This is how we used that operator in the Google search box for our article on how creators can generate passive income and found other, relevant articles that included this phrase: site:thecreatorsdiary.com “passive income” |
Keyword-optimized links
As the last subtopic in the links section, let’s discuss anchor text. Anchor text is made of the words that get highlighted when you put a link behind them. These are important from an SEO point of view because you can put your keywords in there, as a further step of optimizing your content.
These are the different types of anchor text:
- Exact match: the anchor text is exactly the keyword that the given page is optimized for (the one you are linking to)
- Brand: the anchor text is the name of a brand
- Generic: “click here”, “read more”-type of text
- Naked URL: it’s just the plain URL
What’s the main message here?
When you link to a page, check what keyword you optimized it for, and use that keyword in the internal link’s anchor text in the article from where the link will be pointing outward.
Exact match and the brand anchor text are what you should mainly use, and only a few of the generic-type ones—and completely ignore the naked URLs.
When it comes to the exact match anchor text, it’s also good to know that, with time, as you link multiple times to the same page, you should try to use variations of the same keyword that the page is optimized for.
An exact match is great, but Google notices when something is unnatural and overdoing the keyword optimization of your links this way would definitely belong in that category (and can result in a penalty). This is true for both internal and external links.
Example ✍️
Here’s an example of an exact match anchor text for a URL in blue that navigates readers to a page we optimized for “passive income for artists” on The Creators’ Diary:
