Links and SEO

First off we are going to mention 3 primary types of links that affect your website SEO and its effectiveness: internal links, external links, and backlinks.

What is an Internal Link?

Internal links are links that go from one page to another page on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation. These type of links are useful for three reasons:

§  They allow users to navigate a website.

§  They help establish information hierarchy for the given website.

§  They help spread link juice (ranking power) around websites.

What is an External Link?

An external link is a link that points at an external domain.

§  Many SEO professionals believe that external links are the most important source of ranking power.

§  External links pass "linkjuice" (ranking power) differently than internal links because the search engines consider them as third-party votes.

§  Many SEO professionals don't believe that the "title" attribute is used for rankings purposes.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks refer to hyper-links pointing to a particular Web page. Backlinks are important to SEO, because Google considers the quality and quantity of backlinks to determine "PageRank".

To be clear, backlinks aren't the single determining factor for search rank, but they are a factor that's often abused for Google search results. Google is constanly tweaking their search ranking formulas, "alogorithms", in order to weed out pages that earn their rank through wrongful means. Many companies ran into trouble for creating an artificial web of backlinks in order to inflate their ranking. If you'd like to get legitimate backlinks the correct way, create great quality relevant niche content that people want to link. That's easier said than done in this age of social media, because most social media tools use links that are automatically tagged as "nofollow" for Google in order to prevent spammers from using the system as an automated backlinking system. 

What are Link Value Factors?

Link Value Factors are best described by this article from WIEP.net which was determined by which factors professionals from the field of SEO consider to be of influence on the value of a link and/or on the potential amount of link juice that a link can pass. Because most of us understand the value of links in terms of traffic, this research mainly focuses on the value that search engines may allocate to a link.