Best Practices for Internal and External Link Building

In order to get it right with your link building campaigns, I've put together some best practices to guide you.

1 - Focus on Quality First

The first thought that comes to most people is how many links to include in a post. And to that I always answer "as many as possible", meaning it could be 2, 3, 4, or 5.

But the first thing that needs to be addressed is the quality of links. Are you linking to an authority website or blog? Is there any logical relationship between the contents at both ends of the link? Are the linking contents providing any value to each other?

If the scenario satisfies these questions, then the resulting link is a quality one.

2 - Avoid Too Many Links

Now to the question of how many external links are "enough" for one post. It depends on the length of your post and the depth of your research.

I would say anything from 2 to 5 backlinks is ideal for a 1,000-word post. And if you have many more links, you should consider explaining the concepts rather than adding too many links.

3 - Carry Out Frequent Link Audits

It could be a bi-monthly, monthly, or quarterly link audit of your web pages and posts. Through this, you will be able to find out broken links or links that are no more relevant.

Do this as often as possible and clean up any links that cease to add value to your pages.

4 - Be Strategic With Link Building

Links are so central to the success of your site that you need to incorporate them into your strategy.

Have frequent meetings with team members and deliberate on ways to make your links more valuable. And for internal links, you need to have a working plan that will help build a solid logical structure.

5 - Use the Right Anchor Texts

Anchor texts are very important elements for link building, whether internal or external links.

They provide context between both linking resources, so you have to ensure your anchor texts are relevant. If Google finds out that your anchor texts are irrelevant to the linked contents, you may get penalized for it.

So ensure you're using the right anchor texts for both external and internal links.

Conclusion

Links are vital elements of websites that can be used to improve user experience and boost SEO. However, you need to apply best practices if you want to enjoy the full benefits of internal and external links on your site.

I'm hopeful that this guide sets you on the right path towards building effective links for your blog.