Link building is an effective strategy for boosting SEO. If properly done, you can provide visitors with great user experience while improving search engine ranking for your site.

Most bloggers will claim that they actively build up their site's links. But how many really do this effectively?

For link building (both internal and external) to be effective, you need to apply best practices. And since best practices are completely new to some bloggers, this tutorial will help provide the much-needed guidance.

And if you're already applying link building best practices, you can use the information here as a reference. As a prerequisite to understanding all about internal and external links, we will start from the foundation and work our way up.

The Basics of Internal and External Links

In order to understand the role links play on the web, we need to go from the very beginning.

The worldwide web was simply a concept that was created to help link documents using hyperlinks. These hyperlinks enable a user to move from one document to another without leaving their physical location.

This made the internet the largest library filled with every resource you can think of. And as each new resource is linked to the existing ones, the internet keeps growing in size and quality.

So, links act as a glue to connect different online resources together and to make it easier for users to navigate the internet.

Bringing it home to our tutorial topic, internal and external backlinks help your visitors connect with different resources on the Internet. And the more effective you are at building these links the more valuable your website becomes.

That's why Google rewards websites that observe good linking practices with higher search rankings.

If you have ever read a well-researched paper, you would notice citations and references to information sources. These details are included to show the reader where some facts were obtained from.

Links do the same for websites and pages, showing your audience the source of your information, and giving them the means of studying further on a particular topic.

Links are so important that Google especially looks out for them when crawling and indexing websites. Links can be further broken down into two broad categories namely external and internal links.