Inbound linking and internal linking are both important components of any successful SEO campaign, but they are not the same thing. It is important for webmasters and site owners to understand how these two link building strategies are different and how to best utilize them for their own SEO. Internal linking and inbound linking both work to build your site’s trust factor with the search engines and enhance user-experience, but they do so in different ways.
An inbound link (also known as a one-way link) is a link that points from an external source (like a blog post, author bio, other website or social profile) to the main website. It doesn’t have to link to the homepage, although many tend to. Meanwhile, an internal link is just that; it’s a link from one internal page of the website to another. Your drop down menu on your homepage is a series of internal links, taking visitors further into your site.
Inbound Linking
An inbound link building campaign is all about developing a series of quality, relevant, one-way
links that point to your site. The more links your site has pointing to
it, the better trust factor it has with the search engines. Links tell
the search engines that your site is useful and full of high-quality
content. This is because each link passes along “link juice” (aka link
credit) from one site to the next. The more trust the external site has,
the more link credit it passes along to your site. This is why it is so
important to build links from reputable and quality sites. Having
10,000 links is great, but if the majority of them are coming from “bad
sites” (i.e. porn sites, gambling sites, splogs, etc), it doesn’t really
do anything positive for your site. In fact, a site that has a lot of
these bad links can incur a penalty from the search engines and actually
be removed from the results pages.
Good inbound links should direct a visitor further down the path of information they are on. If someone is reading a blog post about a product your company recently launched, the appropriate inbound link would direct them to the product page so they can learn more. You never want to try and trick a visitor by linking to a page of your site that has nothing to do with where it is coming from. If someone is reading an article about dog grooming, then clicks a link that brings them to a page on your site that talks about car maintenance, they are going to feel like they’ve been mislead.
Internal Linking
Internal linking helps you build a
flatter site structure. A good rule of thumb is that is should rarely
take more than three clicks for a user to get from your homepage to any
other internal page of your site. The less clicks is takes a visitor to
find the information they are looking for, the more likely they are to
stick around. By linking related pages of your site together, you can
keep your visitor engaged. A great example of internal linking is the
Amazon “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section on their
product pages. By stringing related pages together, they provide more
information and value for their visitors.
You can build your own internal linking structure by creating a well organized high-level drop down menu and including a footer that mirrors that menu. If you operate a company blog, your posts are a great place to link to related posts or pages of your main website.
Both inbound link building and internal linking have their place in any good SEO campaign. The most successful sites incorporate both types of links and by doing so help build their online presence, trust factor and user-experience at the same time.