Linking to Related Resources

It’s best practice to provide a good mix of internal and external links to relevant, helpful material. This creates a better experience for readers as they can follow links to learn more about a topic on your site or an external site. Internal links are links to other pages that sit on your domain, external links are links to an external domain - a domain that is not the one that your page is currently on.

Using Internal Links

Where possible, use as many links to other existing pages on your site as possible. Using these internal links shows Google how your content is related and helps readers learn more about the topics you’ve written about.

As for the link text, don’t “overdo” it. Write in a way that’s helpful for readers while thinking about related keywords when possible. Here are a couple examples of striking this balance:

Do: Have human reading behavior in mind

You can find more about Core Web Vitals <here> (“here” being the link to what you link to)

Don’t: Overly optimize for machines

Find more about this here: <All you need to know about Core Web Vitals> (“All you need to know about Core Web Vitals” being the link)

If you’re creating new content on your site every week, you’ll need to regularly conduct content audits to identify internal backlinking opportunities and update content that’s gotten stale.

Using External Links

Good content should link to relevant external websites as well.

While you probably should not link to articles from direct competitors that outrank your own articles (this may serve to improve their rankings), you should link to external materials that are well-written, relevant, and helpful to your readers.

Search engines want to see links to expert content because this improves the experience for readers. While you might have great content for most of the relevant topics in your niche, there will always be topics you don’t want to cover or haven’t covered yet. In these cases, you should link to good external resources that help your reader with what they are trying to achieve.