Internal vs External Linking

I probably shouldn't have put "vs" in the title of this post since realistically, both internal and external links play an important part in your site's visibility.

In general, external links build a sites authority and (when done properly) relevance. Internal links help to retain authority or "link juice" and also help to confirm your site's relevance as well. It's not quite as black and white as that see breakdown below:

External Links

• External Links Are King - Your site needs them to build authority and the more of them you can get the better.
• Not All Links Are Created Equal - Sites linking to you that are relevant to your sites topic or "niche" help to add the most authority, as do sites with high PR or social bookmarking sites. That's not to say that links from off-topic sites do not benefit you, but if possible it's of great benefit to obtain links from sites relating to your sites topic.
• Anchor Text Matters, A Lot - Gone are the days of the Google bomb (remember "miserable failure" hahaha…good stuff) but anchor text still plays a very important role in search engine algorithms. When obtaining a link from an external source make SURE the anchor text is on topic or even better, contains keywords you are trying to rank well for. Diversity is key in this situation, if you go out and get 1000 links with the anchor text "mesothelioma lawyer" you aren't going to fare as well as if you divide the anchor text into 333 links of "mesothelioma lawyer", 333 "mesothelioma attorney" and 333 "asbestos cancer lawyer". These are not magic numbers, I'm just showing you and example. You want a lot of links with good anchor text, but anchor text diversity is just as important.
• Link to a Quality Landing Page - When obtaining links, make sure they go somewhere worth while. All the links in the world (ok maybe not ALL) are going to help you rank well for "mesothelioma lawyer" if your landing page has mostly information about a products liability attorney. Relevance and keyword density on your landing pages are important for getting the most out of your external links.

Internal Links

• The Juice is Loose! - You've gotten the search engine spiders to follow the external links to your relevant and keyword rich landing page. Now what? Why not pass a bit o' link juice on to some of your internal pages and build your authority at the same time? This is done pretty easily. Say I have a landing page about mesothelima, mesothelioma is caused by prolonged exposure to asbestos. So somewhere on my landing page I will most liekly have the word "asbestos" somewhere on there. Since asbestos is relevant to mesothelioma, I would find the first occurence of the word on my landing page and link it to another page on my site that's keyword rich and all about asbestos. You don't want to link every occurence of the word or phrase, just the first.
• rel="nofollow"...Don't Go Overboard With It - Your site has tons of external links, you have content rich pages with a wonderful internal linking structure so you're done right? Well no, not if you want to get all you can out of it. You probably have links on your site that point to external sources and chances are many of you have a rel="nofollow" tag on all of them. This isn't going to help you and here's why. Firstly at this point, only Google pays any attention to this tag. Second, Google has updated their algorithm to give more weight to pages that have 2-4 external links without the nofollow tag, as long as it's to an "authority". So what does this mean? Well if I have a mesothelioma page with say 6 links on it, I wouldn't want to have the nofollow tag on the link to the Nationa Cancer Institute, but I might want to use it on the link to Bob's Asbestos Blog.