They are SO important, clever and get you noticed in the competitive digital world. 

Let us tell you why… without links, Google (or other search engines) may not discover your pages, or think that they’re important. 

When a website links to another website search engines notice and see it as a sign of trust. Every trusted website that has a link to your website on it is improving the reputation of your site. 

While links are a powerful way of improving your SEO, there are so many different types it can be confusing. There are also links to avoid, and some traps you don’t want to fall into. 

If you’re new to our page you won’t yet know that we like to break through the jargon of the SEO world. So, here is a list of different types of links you’ll come across in the optimisation game and a description of what on earth they mean! 

Text links - the everyday and most familiar

Text links are self explanatory. It’s that bit of text on your website that is clickable. SEO best practice is to make sure that the clickable text (usually underlined in blue) is relevant to the page it links to and not just random text. 

It’s possible to change the colour and length of the text link too to make it more obvious to see and relevant to the page it links through to. 

You’ll already know about sponsored links - you get bombarded with them every time you go online. 

A sponsored link, quite simply, is the result of a paid advert. 

Image links are exactly what they sound like. 

But don’t be fooled by the straightforward description - they are a valuable link to use. 

If you’ve got images, graphics or infographics on your website, you can link them. By turning images into links you are creating usable link-eable quality content for other people to use on their sites and link to yours. High quality images are a great way to attract real-life, authentic links from other trusted websites. 

Link your images ya’ll! 

Nofollow links… huh? 

Surely you want to follow all the links right? We’ve been going on about how great links are for adding value to your site. BUT NoFollow is a clever ‘attribute’...

SIDE NOTE: an ‘attribute’ is the jargon-y name given to a section of html code you add into a link to tell the computer what you want it to do with it. 

A ‘nofollow’ attribute can be applied to your links to tell search engines not to trust it. To ignore it and not to include it in their rankings. It’s a way of protecting your site from getting a bad reputation if people are linking to your site and you don’t want them to. 

For example, you can add ‘nofollow’ to a link on your site that takes users to an advert. Because an advert is paid for, and you might receive some compensation if people follow the link from your page, it isn’t considered organic traffic. It’s paid for. Adding ‘no follow’ to the link means that Google won’t count it towards your ranking. So your site remains trustworthy and your ranking legitimate! 

The links list goes on with… dofollow links and manual links, editorial, internal and so many more. But whatever you’re using, or include on your website in the future, it’s important not to take any risks. 

There are some links that can get you in trouble with the big gun search engines like Google and Bing. Some people try to cut corners and con their way around guidelines to get more traffic to their pages. We’re not even going to tell you how. BECAUSE we want you to have clean, non-risky, well-loved links that build both your users and the search engines trust! 

If you are completely overwhelmed by this link-y world then here are some top tips to keep everyone happy: 

• Whatever you’re building, creating or dreaming up on your website, stick to the ‘webmaster guidelines’ yes, that is a real thing 

• Write your own content that is informative, high quality and real 

• Grow a community that likes and trusts you slowly rather than a huge following of users you don’t know. Quality over quantity - all the way. 

Links play a huge role in best practice SEO and we don’t want to pile on the pressure to HAVE THE BEST LINKS EVER, which is why Wild SEO is here to help. 

If you want to talk about anything covered above, or get some help with adding the right links into your website then shout at anytime!