How to Create a Link to a Website: From Your Website

Intro.

As a beginner to website creation, you may be unaware to the importance of links between your website pages. Similarly, links to other peoples websites are also important, but only if they are the correct external websites.

I’m going to give you an idea of what external links you may consider for your website, and how to implement internal and external links.

I’ll also explain why it’s important to have these links within your content, and what makes them so valuable.

Why Internal Links Are Important for SEO

An internal link is when you link a piece of content in an article or post, to another of your own posts. For instance, this is an internal link on using jump link WordPress code. If you hover over this link text, you’ll see that it can be clicked on. When someone clicks on it, they’ll be taken to this internal article of mine.

Now, it’s not only beneficial for readers to be able to go and read that article, it’s also a boost to my SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search engines like internal and external links, so adding a few internal links on each post is ideal.

The words you use for internal linking give Google an idea of what the linked article is about. Notice I’ve used the wording ‘using jump link WordPress code’. This is not only what the article is about, but it’s part of my main keyword. Ideally, you’ll be showing Google the relevancy between the post or page your linking to.

Internal Link Diagram

Why External Links Are Important For SEO

Google and other search engines appreciate a balance of internal and external links. In this instance, an external link displays to Google that you’re adding a reference to your article, to build on the current information you’re providing.

Again, it will help with your ranking in Google when you link a relevant external post, to a relevant piece of text content.

External link Diagram

Be careful with external links in regards to the sites you’re linking to. It used to be that any external link would give you credibility, in turn offering you more ‘SEO juice’. However, things have changed and now you’re best to link to external websites that are an authority site. This basically means, don’t link to your best mates website that doesn’t get any traffic.

How to Create a Link to a Website

Adding a link to a website from within WordPress in simple. Simply highlight the text you’d like to link from, and click the link symbol. Lets say I want to highlight to an article about the best online affiliate marketing course that I’ve written about. Firstly I highlight the text like so:

The dialog box that has appeared will show a cog at the end. Click on this to open up a larger dialog box which will show all the posts you’ve created. To find the relevant post I’m after, I can start typing in the post title.

As you can see in the image above, the article I’m after is the third one down the list. All I need to do is click this title, followed by clicking the ‘Add Link’ button. You’ll also have an option to open the link in a new tab. I generally don’t do this for my own internal links, but if I’m adding an external link, I believe it’s more valuable to tick this box.

Also, opening in a new tab is considered an exit to your site, which increases your exit rate in Google Analytics. This can possibly lower your ranking.

So, by opening a new tab for external links, a visitor can still come back to my website should they like my content, as my website will still be open on the original tab.

Link Externally

To link to an external website, it’s done in a similar manner. The only differences being, that you’ll place the external website path in the top field where it says ‘URL’. As I previously mentioned, I’d be ticking the ‘open link in new tab’ check box.

That’s basically it, there’s not much more to internal or external linking.

Affiliate Links

So what about affiliate links? Well, this can be done the same way as any other external links. Simply grab the code from the affiliate program you’ve joined and place the code in the destination URL field. This is similar for images also. If you’ve placed a product image in your post, click on the image, click ‘Edit’, and a new dialog box with your image will appear. 

Here you want use the ‘Link To’ dropdown menu and choose ‘Custom URL’. 

Under this, place the affiliate code in the allocated field.

How many links should You Place on Your Posts

There’s no set rule that I’m aware of, but in my opinion, you want to add at least 2 internal links and 1-2 external links as a minimum. You can always add to this as you create more posts. Obviously this is difficult in the beginning but as time goes on, you’ll have many more articles to choose from.

Wrapping Up

As you can probably tell, internal and external links are going to play a huge part in your blogging success. These are one of the SEO factors that can be easily implemented, so ignore these links at your peril.

Search engine optimisation is your key to ranking highly in the SERPS (search engine results pages). There’s a number of on page SEO factors that you can implement yourself, but be sure to use the best free WordPress SEO plugin to help with other factors including your sitemap.

Jump link WordPress code is another type of linking that you may want to consider adding to many of your posts.