Unfortunately, and let's agree from the start, without external links (or backlinks as the known term), it will be much more difficult to lead, and everything you read in this series about speeding up your site and improving your content and others will have less impact on your leadership without these links.
.jpg "The importance of internal links")
Search engines are not convinced that the content of your site is unique, unless it has a good reputation among other sites, it is honestly like an egg and a chicken, Google says that you should publish distinguished content that others refer to, but actually if you publish very distinguished content and did not top (because you lack External links), how will other sites know about your site to point to?
Many will tell you that you have to communicate with these sites and try to build links, and this actually happens all the time, in global sites as well, but this contradicts the main idea of the topic, which is to automatically gain links from others (which is also a method used, but it takes more time and effort).
In this final part of our SEO series for beginners, we will learn all about Internal Links & Backlinks, which will be one of the most important factors influencing the ranking and positioning of your pages on the SERP.
?What are Internal Links
Simply, they are the links that point from one page on your site to another page. For example, if I wanted to talk on this page about ranking and ranking factors , I noticed that I referred to another page on the same site that talks about these factors, although the context could be Not relevant here, but of course you noticed how to link here, and you must have seen it in all the other articles as well.
This internal link is more than useful, in terms of user experience, in terms of site optimization for search engines, and to support your content as well, we will explain this shortly.
It is important in internal linking to try as much as possible that your use of the words you link to refer to the other article, and not all links are on words such as click here, to learn more click here, but try to link to the same word that indicates the article, users today At least most of them know what the link looks like on the page, and that this word refers to another article, and there is no need to tell them that they have to click on the word to go to the page.
Is this always required? No, sometimes you will find that it is more difficult to link to the same word. It is okay for the link to be on another word, but it is important to be close, as search engines look at the context from which it was linked as well.
Benefits of internal links
1) It is possible to take advantage of pages with high credibility with the search engine by referring to pages with less weight on your site, for example, if page 1 leads the search engine on several words, and you have page 2 that barely appears on the second page on search engines, the best Referring (in a logical context of course) from page 1 to page 2, which gives it a good boost to raise its rating on search engines.
2) Linking to words indicating the referenced page improves search engines’ understanding of these pages. For example, if I wanted to explain to you how the process of archiving and indexing your pages is done, I will mostly link to the first part of this series, which talks about
archiving sites and robots files & Sitemap on your site.
Did you notice the word that was attached to it? Just as the title of that page and its content give an idea to the search engine about it, these links also support this.
3) You give additional ideas to the reader so that he can read more about the topic, as most often you link to articles related to the content of your article itself, and the reader may be interested in that content as well.
4) You keep your visitor on your site for a longer time, reduce the bounce rate, exit rate, and other things that you can see on Google Analytics.
5) You can deliver high-quality visits from search engines to articles that are difficult to compete with, and we mentioned this (with the example of the English content site about diamonds) in the keywords article , a visit to your site from a search engine is of high quality, you can redirect it from one page to another cleverly.
What is the ideal length for an article to rank well in search engines? | seo
6) Support (even if a little) the content of your article for the search engine, when you cover the topic in all its aspects, and give the reader other options to increase the topic, this matter is considered by the search engine as a positive thing for the reader, and gives you some preference in ranking.
7) It facilitates and speeds up the process of archiving your pages. When crawlers reach any page, they keep track of all links in it to verify that these links are in the search engine index.
How to build internal links?
The “Similar Articles” or “Other Articles You May Like” part is not what we mean here, although this is included in the number 7 benefit, but its importance to search engines is not as important as the links that come at the heart of the content.
Always try to refer to the “discarded” pages of your site from the main pages, and be sure to build a general structure for your site that facilitates linking between all articles.
Side tip: Always try to put an internal link in the first part of the article, at least in the first or second paragraph. Remember when we talked about the RankBrain system that measures almost everything that happens on a page? This can play a positive role here if someone clicks on another link from your article after accessing it from a search engine.
There are many tools that give you reports on internal links, which pages have the most links (mostly the home page, privacy, contact us, which pages are in the main menus of your site), which pages point to these pages, and so on.
You can use the link reports in the Google Search Console tool, which is indispensable to anyone in the world of SEO. It gives you a special section for internal reports, what are the most important pages that got links, and where did these links come from.
In the previous part (technical SEO) we talked about the Screaming Frog tool, and one of its most important features is the internal link reports. You can see all the links on your site in a coordinated and detailed manner. The results can also be exported to CSV if you are a fan of using Excel to analyze some data.
But if you are like me, you like graphic reports that save you a lot, there are tools that scan your entire site and give you an official visualized visualization of your internal links, perhaps the best (and also free) is VisualSiteMapper.com , write any site there, and you will find an easy-to-analyze interactive image that shows You can have any pages that contain the largest number of links, as well as pages with no or almost no links, such as these:Internal links report from visualsitemapper
What are external links (backlinks) backlinks?
These are the links that you get from outside your site when a site points to you, either to your site in general (with your home page link), or to a specific article (with the link to the article itself).
Back Linux is considered one of the two most important factors out of more than 200 factors involved in Google's algorithms for ranking search results. A Google employee from the Search Quality Team mentioned that the two most important factors (without ranking) are content, and links to your site.
The third factor is RankBrain by the way.
Can you imagine what that means? That is, the backlink factor alone can be more important than dozens of other factors that go into the algorithms, and that is why I mentioned in the introduction to this section that foregrounding would be much more difficult without backlinks.
We mentioned more than once that there are Do-follow and No-follow links, the latter telling search engines that they do not have to follow them (and do not give weight to the sites referred to), but in one way or another, these links help you even if they are No-follow, they are You may give your site fame, you may get high quality traffic from it, and so on.
Usually, the links pointing to you are divided into two parts:
– Links that point to your site, often these links mention the name of your site (your brand name), these links help you gain fame among the sites, and raise standards related to the reputation of your domain, there is more than one measure used here, the most famous of which is the Domain Authority, which Developed by Moz, it measures the number and quality of links pointing to your home page.
– Links to specific articles, and these are in specific contexts about the content of your article, someone could have mentioned them as a source of information he quoted from your page, or referred to your page if his readers want more information about a topic that you detail in your article, and this greatly helps in arranging this Articles are different from others on your site, and are measured by Page Authority using the same Moz metrics.
Backlink benefits
I think it is enough for us to know that it is the first or second most important factor in everything that happens behind the scenes of the search giant Google to choose the order of results on the search results page.
In addition, external links increase the credibility and reputation of your site on the Internet. A site referenced from 1000 sites (with several lines under the type of these sites ), is likely to be better for the search engine than a site that no one mentioned!
For clarification, it is not the number of links, but it includes many things. We explained the most important of them in the Off-page SEO part in the leading factors article. It is not important to obtain external links, but rather it is important that these links are from sites of credibility and good reputation, and to stay away from sites Those selling links - at least publicly - on their pages will be vulnerable to any blow from the search engine.
One of the benefits of external links is also that they enhance the content of your article or site in the field you are talking about. SEO mentions it in the context of matters related to search engine optimization, as this is an external reference to the content of the site, in addition to what is inside the site about this (on-page SEO).
Links are also useful in gaining visits to your site, visits that last for years according to the life cycle of the page that referred to you (a link from a real-time news is different from a link from a blog about a topic you are constantly searching for), free visits from people interested in what you write about, affecting one way or another on Improve your site.
Earning or building backlinks?
When we mentioned this in the internal links section, I only used the term “building”, since you are the one who does this process, you build your internal links as you want, but with external links, the matter is a little different, or a lot!
The origin of links is that you earn them without any effort from you to obtain them directly. The origin of these sites is that you find special content for you, so they refer to you without asking you to do so, but is the reality like this?
Unfortunately, no, with the intense competition between sites for the lead in search results pages, it has become necessary for sites to obtain external links in order to raise their credibility with search engines, that is, there is what is known as building external links and not just earning them.
Because building and earning external links can extend to several articles, we will shortly try to summarize the most important legitimate ways to obtain external links, and we focus here on the word “legal” since many sites that provide SEO services (even the famous ones, unfortunately) sell external links, This is an explicit and clear violation of Google's guidelines for site administrators .
Google's instructions for selling links
These sites that get links in illegal ways may gain a rise in the ranking of their pages, but for how long?
With every major update on Google's algorithms, you will hear many complaints from many SEO "specialists" that the update is devastating and they lost a large percentage of their visits from search engines, as if Google left billions of sites in the world, and only updated to punish them!
Every method that violates Google’s instructions (or even twisting without a clear violation) will be subject to a major change with updates to the search engine algorithms, for example, everyone believed that a topic site swept the first page on search engines, and honestly I was waiting for the update that would solve the problem, so an update came in 2019 It was limited to showing two results from the same site on the result, which led to a huge loss in search engine visits to the largest Arab site, so what about small sites?
In the world of SEO, stick to the instructions of Google and trusted sites, do not listen to those who want to sell you links, do not listen to those who tell you that they will improve your results in less than a month, the Internet is in front of you, read what you want and then decide which ways you will take in the process of optimization for search engines in your location.
In this field, you will find three schools of optimization, an “ethical” school that follows the best standards of search engine optimization, called White Hat SEO, and on the contrary, a school that tries to circumvent search engines such as buying links explicitly, called Black Hat SEO, and both are gray school, trying to follow Ethical but do not avoid detours that don't explicitly break standards, but can be exposed with any update, and it's called Gray Hat SEO.
How to earn and build external links?
I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that this is the hardest thing in the world of SEO! Everything we saw in this series is in one hand, and this is another one!
Method 1: Auto-gain links
We'll start with the easiest part (almost), which is earning links automatically, how can you get external links without direct effort from you?
The answer is very traditional, but it is correct, publish distinctive content, in which you are unique from others, put the results of objective experience in your field in the content, enhance your content with numbers, facts and images in the form of an infographic, as it greatly helps the owners of other sites to quote and refer to your content.
This site you are reading from, I did not ask a content writer to paraphrase several other articles related to the topic to produce a “unique” article for me! I wrote in it what I learned from dozens or hundreds of educational sources over more than 5 years in this field, and my goal in publishing this content is to be a comprehensive reference for beginners in the world of SEO.
Don't wait to earn external links on articles of 300 or even 500 words! These articles hardly cover a small part, and if this part is not unique to you, you will most likely not get any links to it.
On the other hand, in the lead factors part of this series, I wrote about 5500 in it to give you the most important thing you need to learn in this field. An article like this has a “possibility” to earn an external link more than a quick article that does not exceed 500 words on the same topic.
Not telling you to write articles of 5000 words! You have to stand out in your content to make it motivate others to quote you, but let me be a little frank with you.
Unfortunately, in the Arabic content, you will find this process much more difficult, the sites do not refer to each other, especially if they are competing (even if competition is in a very narrow field and not in general), and until the way we deal with this topic changes, you will often resort to other ways to build external links .
The second method: social media
You have to take advantage of the communication platforms that give you Do-follow links, many platforms allow you to build your own pages, from which you can refer to your site directly, and perhaps the most famous of them are YouTube, Pinterest and others.
It is easy, but it must be done carefully so that your account is not banned on these sites, register for your site on these accounts, create your own pages, fill in all the information in an orderly and correct manner, including your site, after a while, this link will often appear on the list of external links on Search Console.
There are many platforms that allow you to do this, you can search for them yourself or check out this list .
You can not rely on this method, it will hardly give you links that do not exceed the fingers of a hand, and you can only say that it is “better than nothing”, because of course nothing you want for your site.
Method 3: Websites interested in your content
I will give you an example from this same site you are reading from, the site is important for anyone who works in digital marketing and wants to learn SEO, or at least I suppose that.
It wouldn't make sense for me to go to my competing sites and ask them to point out my articles, but what I can do is look for a different segment of sites that might be interested in what I write, but don't cover it that much, like who?
Sites that explain how websites can be built from scratch, or marketing sites on social media platforms, content-specialized sites that want to explain to their readers how they can get keywords for their articles, sites that mention SEO casually in their articles (and these I will expand on shortly as they are treasure).
You have to start searching, start from Google and search for these sites, and when you find them, do not send an email to the owners asking them to refer to your site, no, do some extra effort, search his site for an article that mentions something from your content, then send him and tell him that you That article is special, and at that particular point in the article, it can be helpful for readers to refer to another article that expands on that point.
Does this method always work? No, of course not, it is possible that it is difficult to communicate with the owner of the site, or that the e-mail on the site is monitored by someone who is not interested in this, or that the owner of the site is not interested in the subject at all, because he knows what you want, of course (often).
Therefore, we reiterate and emphasize that if your article is stuffed, copied or has scant content, you will not succeed in obtaining links in this way, nor in any other way.
We said that it is not logical to communicate with competing sites, but what about sites that mention SEO in an occasional article of their articles and do not specialize in it?
Do a Google search for your main keywords, then go to the tenth page or more of the search results pages, you will find articles that did not top the search engine in these words, for many reasons, one of the most important of which could be that the site that presents these articles is not competitive in its content For the main sites, that is, they are not specialized in this field, contact the owners of these sites and present your content to them.
Fourth method: Guest Blogging
Here you have to be careful, be very careful! This method of writing has been punished more than once by search engines according to the development of its detection algorithms.
The more there is a “material” incentive to earn links in this way, the greater the risk that you will be affected by an update coming from the search engines. How does this process work?
We'll start with the method that will get you in trouble sooner or later.
You will find hundreds and even thousands of sites that allow you to write for them, in any field and with any content, for a fee or even for free. You can search on Google for “guest blogging websites” and you will find what you want, sites that want content regardless of its quality and quality (mostly), It will allow you to insert one or more links to your site in your content that you will provide to them.
?How do search engines know about these sites
No need for data science and artificial intelligence here, a quick look at these sites you will find that they write about everything, their classifications are unclear or illogical, every article refers to one site! Even the sites he refers to have nothing to do with each other!
Do not write on these sites, if you get external links from them, you will be subject at any time to a change in the search engine algorithms and lose your ranking.
On the contrary, there is a distinct and good way to build external links by writing for sites, but how is it different?
They differ in their main purpose, and is there an incentive for them? Is it a single article or a continuous contribution? Do you have an account on these sites or are you just a “visitor”?
To build links of this kind (and before you continue reading I tell you, it is more difficult than you expect, if it was easy to earn links, Google would not have given it all that weight), select a good number of blogging sites, whether in your field (which is better of course) or in other fields In general, such as AraGeek , for example, you can communicate with these sites, provide samples of your writing, offer to submit an article to them on a monthly or weekly basis if you can, and request the ability to include a link to your site in these articles, or if possible, create an account (page) for you on the site that indicates to your site.
I will not tell you to write your best in these articles, the best you have leave it to your site, but it is okay to make some effort in writing a distinguished article in order to be accepted by the famous platforms, their standards are high in accepting articles, and you have to be distinguished to get links from them.
Do not limit yourself to these general blogs only, but you can communicate with sites similar to your site, but they need content writers permanently, if this site is your direct competitor, avoid this, but in general, you can find sites that are not considered competition for you, provide them with writing services Articles invariably, they benefit from the content, and you benefit from the link in your article.
Method 5: Reviews & Listing Sites
?Another nice way too, I'm writing about SEO here, right
If you search for “search engine optimization” on Google, the competition will most likely be fierce there, and it is difficult to get links from these sites as they are directly competitive, but there is another way.
What if you search for “best sites to learn SEO” for example?
I will get results for sites that compile educational resources in their articles, and often they are not specialized in this field, but indicate educational sites, these sites are a direct target for earning links!
Many sites collect educational resources on different fields, so you find a title on a particular site “Top 10 Resources to Learn English”, and another “Design Education Sites” and more. If you search for sites that review educational resources in your field, this will be a great opportunity to gain links from them, reach out to them, and explain to them why it would be useful for readers of this article to know about your site.
Sixth method: Forums
It may seem old, for forums were at the beginning of this century a technical revolution in the world of the Internet, but what is surprising is that there are still a good number of active forums and they have permanently interacting visitors!
Personally, I do not recommend it as a source that you rely on in building links, for many reasons, many of them are considered spam and nothing more, forums refer to millions of sites in any field, you find everyone has put the link of his site in his signature and commented on 1000 topics in order to get 1000 external links , then if there is an update from Google and it loses its ranking, claim that the update is wrong and disastrous and and.
But if you want to build some links there, do not use the spam method, whether with unimportant posts (in the form of: Thank you for sharing an important article, and your link), or by putting your site link in the comment, do not do any of this.
Rather, publish useful content there, excerpt from your site for those who ask about things you answer, give him the adequate answer there and then put a link for those who wanted more, and use it logically and be careful, and do not rely heavily on it to build your links, but go to the seventh method.
I think you know Quora, Reddit and other foreign question-and-answer communities of hundreds of millions of people, asking about everything, answering everything, fortunately, the Arab digital community has developed recently and we have an alternative to the old forums, which are these communities.
Want my direct advice? This is the direct treasure for you, hundreds and possibly thousands of people who ask about things related to your content, you can find them by searching or even by categories specialized in your field.
Build a good account for you, fill in all your information carefully (and do not hide under pseudonyms and hidden pictures, this weakens the reputation of your account, and make the accounts individual and not in the name of your site), search in the ratings of these sites for questions you know the answers to, and answer them completely, that is, no You answer half of the question and leave the other half on your site to force them to go to your site. Remember that your goal here is to build links, not bring traffic, and you can link on your site by answering an appropriate Anchor text, or putting a source for the answer from your site.
These communities have general rules that you must follow carefully, violating and misusing them will result in your account and your answers being deleted, so be careful and act professionally here.
Here I will list some of the most famous Arabic sites that have Q&A communities:
Answer site
– Answer site (same name but with a different domain, always choose your site name carefully)
Mulhim platform ( it's more for blogging and sharing ideas than question and answer, but it's a good place to build your reputation)
There are many other sites, and honestly, I was not sure that these sites give Do-follow links , and I did not want to lengthen the list, as the goal is not to list them all here, but rather to give you an idea about these communities and how they are, start with what you feel is closer to what they offer, create your accounts , and set aside time a week to answer people's queries (even slightly old questions).
Conclusion
If I wanted to summarize the entire article for you in one sentence, it would be:
Do not be deceived then do not be deceived and buy external links to your site! Work on building it yourself.
Yes, it may be easier to talk than to apply, and this is why it has a very large weight in Google algorithms, you have a lot of ways to build these links as we have seen, start with the way that suits you, and do not forget and neglect the content, which will help you to gain links automatically.
Internal links are very important to your site, such as archiving, linking articles, keeping the visitor, and promoting content, make sure your internal links make sense and are clear to your readers.
With this, we have come to the end of the sixth and final part of the series on learning SEO for beginners, in which we covered the basics of the world of optimization for search engines, but remember that this is only an introduction, nothing more, the application is more important than everything you have read, and in case you have any questions or need help, do not Feel free to contact us directly through the “Contact Us” page.