What Are External Links?
External links are one of the professional terms in SEO and fall under the category of SEO tutorials. To achieve keyword rankings for a website and make them appear more “natural”, external links are essential. Given the important role of external links, it is necessary to understand what they are. A deep understanding of the concept of external links can help make your website optimization more efficient.

 

## 1. What are external links?
There have been many definitions of external links in search engines. In short, **external links are links pointing to your website from other sites outside your own domain**.
Search engine spiders crawl links across the Internet non-stop. Through links from other websites, spiders can access your website content, which may then be crawled and indexed.

 

## 2. What types of external links are there?
External links mainly come in three forms: **anchor text links**, **hyperlinks**, and **plain text links**.

1. Anchor text links are links embedded with keywords or phrases, which jump to the target page when clicked.
2. Hyperlinks are links containing a URL, which also redirect when clicked.
3. Plain text links are similar to pure text; they look like a URL but do not respond when clicked.

In terms of improving keyword rankings:
anchor text links > hyperlinks > plain text links.

 

## 3. What functions do external links have?
External links serve many purposes for a website, the most typical being a “voting” mechanism, as explained below:

### 1. Improve keyword rankings
The Internet is a network made up of numerous links. If multiple pages link to your site, it can be seen as voting for your website, which will greatly boost your keyword rankings.
Simply put, it is not persuasive when you praise yourself; you are truly excellent only when most people recognize you. This is the role of link voting.

### 2. Increase indexing
Search engine spiders reach your website through other sites. The wider your external links are distributed, the more spiders will crawl your site and the higher the frequency.
Accordingly, if your website pages are of good quality, they will be indexed in greater numbers.

### 3. Enhance website authority

For example: if your website has a prominent link on an authoritative platform, it will undoubtedly improve your site’s credibility and authority.

### 4. Directly increase website traffic
Both anchor text links and hyperlinks are clickable. If users visit your pages through links you published or naturally shared by others, your website traffic will rise directly.

 

## Summary
While continuously building on-page content, support from external links is required to ensure SEO effects.
For this reason, we need a deeper understanding of external links to operate them more efficiently, avoid search engine algorithms targeting abnormal links, make our external links grow “naturally”, and achieve the final website optimization goals.

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