As you start to venture into the unknown of websites and all that they entail, you might start to wonder if there is any importance to the links and domains associated with different sites.
In short, yes there is a lot to learn and know about these links are you start your journey. For instance, your website will automatically create links for your home page, contact page, blogs you posts, and anything else you create on your site. You can actually control and manipulate these links, which you should.
We are going to dive into website links, why they are important, what a domain name is, what really lies behind that domain name, and things to avoid with links. There is a lot to learn, but if you do the research now and avoid some problems, then you will save yourself tons of time and possibly hundreds and thousands of backlinks later on.
Lets start of by reviewing website links in general.
What Is A Website Link
What is a website link? Well, it is that address that you copy and paste into the search bar on search engines that takes you directly to a website.
Every single link has several things associated with it that you might not have realized. Most links will have “https://” before them which is very important. The “http” stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Hypertext Transfer Protocol” (HTTP). The additional S on the end in https stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure” (HTTPS).
This basically tells your web browser how to open the page you are navigating to. Most websites are running HTTPS these days because Google made it a necessity. For those sites that do not run it, Google will penalize your search rankings, and you could even be enabling hackers by not adding it to your site. Therefore, it is very smart to update your site to this secure method.
The second part of a link is the domain name. Take for example the website you are on now:
As you can see, the second part after the security protocol is the domain name of the website you are trying to access – “Honolulutribe.com”
The “.com” is another indicator of the type of website you are opening and looking for. This is not as important to know about, but it is important to know that “.com” is the most common type of site and the one most people will naturally try to type into the web browser when searching for your site.
For those reasons, the “.com” websites can cost more than others like “.net”, “.co”, and etc.
The next part of a web link is the page of the domain that you would like to access.
Website Pages
Your website will have a bunch of pages on it over time. Especially if you are writing blogs or continually adding new sections to your business.
Each of these pages will have a unique web link assigned to them that is very important. Those web links will look something like this:
“https://honolulutribe.com/photography/“
As you can see above, the link will take you to a part of our website that shows you photography blog posts. This is a specific page we created in order to isolate specific posts for ease of people looking for them.
As you can see, every single page and blog post on your site will require a unique web link to assign to it. Luckily, wordpress and most site generators will do this automatically for you, but there is something to know. There are certain generated web links that you will want to avoid.
Things To Avoid For Your Web Links
The first thing to avoid is lengthy web links. Web links that have the generated Php title or even extra characters can really be a pain to deal with, look unprofessional, and make managing your web links a nightmare.
It is best to keep your web links simple and clean like the one you see above. Clearly, just by reading it you can tell it takes you to a photography section of blog post. Pretty simple to figure that out.
Dates In Weblinks
A huge thing to avoid is allowing dates in your web links. When I created one of my more popular blogs, the word press web link generator was adding the date into my blog posts every time I made a new one. I thought nothing of it, but over time I realized something horrible.
Google was using these dates in the web links to compare my posts to more recent posts. At the same time, posts without clear dates were being valued as newer posts over some of my older ones. While that might not seem like a huge issue, it starts to make a difference when your posts get ranked less and less on search engines and your average reader count starts to drop because of it. This is because Google is always looking for new, updated content.
Basically, people will have a harder time to organically find your older posts on the internet if you include dates in your web links.
Even worse, when you go to fix this problem and change your web links to exclude the dates, it changes every single post and page on your website. That does simplify you doing it yourself. Although, what it does not update are the backlinks on other websites across the internet.
Sadly, I had hundreds of backlinks to my older posts that now take people to blank pages on my website that say “post can not be found”. This is because I changed the weblink on those posts to exclude the date they were written, after they had already backlinked to my website.
Importance Of Backlinks
Backlinks are extremely important, and they are the hardest thing to build up over time.
Backlinks are what determine your domain authority which is how Google ranks your blog compared to others. Take for instance if you write a post about horses and you have a domain authority of 20.
That is great and Google will rank you post, but what if another website writes a similar post about horses with a domain authority of 50? Well, their post will come up first on search engines before yours does.
So, backlinks are incredibly important. Losing them is a devastation to your website’s overall health and average reader count.
Therefore, make sure your web links are primed and perfect before you make your posts, or you could risk losing vital backlinks costing you growth and organic search results.
Web Links Overview
Thanks for reading my post on web links. I hope this helps you avoid some of the mistakes I made on my first few websites. Take the time to set up your website properly in the beginning and save yourself the heartache later on of having to change it and losing all of those precious back links.
In addition, I hope this post helped shed light on what web links really are, and how to properly use them.
Thanks again for reading. If you need more information on creating websites, blogging, and getting started then check out this post here.
