How to increase external and internal followed links?

[wonderdome]

From analyzing my competitor‘s websites I can see that I have way fewer external and internal followed links. The number of followed links my competitors are getting each week increases by around 300.

Where do these links come from?

How can I increase my followed links ?

[Christy-Correll]

Just another brief test, nothing to see here...

[Casey_Bryan]

Very thorough answers already provided however I wanted to make a couple of suggestions on how to build up internal links further:

• Adding an htm sitemap if you don’t already have one

• Adding breadcrumbs if you don’t already have them

I hope this helps somewhat

Cheers,

Casey

[MiriamEllis]

Good morning, Wonderdome!

Great question. Very briefly:

Increasing internal links typically depends on having a vision for how the content on your website is related. Let's say you run a website selling gardening tools. You write an article about the importance of weeding around seedlings when planting a native plant garden. It's natural, in this case, to link from your page about weeding, to your page selling a stirrup hoe, which is a tool for weeding. Look at the total picture of your website content and find the relationships between topics. Linking to highlight these relationships is meant to improve user experience on your website, letting a visitor know that if they are reading the page about weeding in native plant gardens, your stirrup hoe is a really helpful tool for this. By finding the relationships, you will be enriching the navigational architecture of your website.

Increasing links pointing to your site from external sources typically revolves around two things. The first scenario relates to links you earn based on merit, without having to ask for them. Let's say you write the best article on the web about planting native California roses in the garden. You may find that the usefulness of the article earns links on its own, perhaps from garden enthusiast organizations, gardening blogs, native plant societies, and even government sites talking about water conservation through native gardening. Over time, if your article is truly useful, it may earn some very good links from third parties.

The second scenario involves actively asking for links. Let's say you're going to give a talk at a local university about native plant gardening. You could ask the university to link to your website from their upcoming events page. You could ask the local newspaper to do the same. You could ask local gardening clubs to do the same from their websites. In fact, you could create a piece of static content that summarizes your presentation and offer it to third parties and a resource that might be of help to their readers. You could earn some links from that, if what you create is good enough. I'm emphasizing this, because unless you have something of note to publicize, it's not going to be easy to get people to link to you. So, merit is still involved here, but the difference is that you are actively asking people to notice what you are doing, whether that's an event you're participating in, a video you've created, an eBook you've published, an article you've written, a graphic you've created, or what have you.

On a final note, if your business model is local (like a retail store), you'll also be building some links on local business directories like YP.com, Foursquare, Bing, etc. You'll be creating business listings on these platforms that link to your website. But if your business model is virtual (like an e-commerce site), then building links on most directories is typically a waste of your time.

If linkbuilding is new to you, please do check out the section on this exact topic in our Beginner's Guide to SEO: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Hope this helps!

[Christy-Correll]

Just testing something, folks... please disregard this response!

[I.AM.Strategist]

Hello,

Are you a Moz subscriber? If you're tracking a website and competitors, you can use the links tool to see precisely what links your competitors are getting: Domain | Linking Page | Anchor Text.

[martinxm]

External links are more complicated to achieve. But you can follow the guidelines indicated in the answer above.

For internal links, you can do them yourself. In SEO it is advised that there are not more than 100 links that point to a page, but I have not tried this yet.

In short, make a keyword plan to make internal links in a structured way. It is the best option for SEO.

[Andrew-SEO]

You need to identify were the links are coming from.

Is your competitor forging online relationships? Do they have an active blog. Do they have active social media. Are they part of online communities.

Is their domain authority increasing i.e. are the links they are generating good quality? Or are they potentially damaging in the the long run? Don't emulate them if they are not engaged in high quality link building.

You can increase links by generating high quality content that people want to link to. You can also be active on social media. Social Shares are just as important. There's no easy fix here. A solid content marketing strategy backed by a solid social media strategy will naturally expand your backlink profile.