How to add external links: A guide to boosting credibility and SEO

Adding external links to your content might feel like a tiny task on your pre-publish checklist, but it's a whole lot more than that. It's a strategic move that can really affect your SEO, build trust with your audience, and establish you as an authority in your field.

While Google has mentioned that external links aren't a direct ranking factor, they send a huge signal that your content is high-quality and trustworthy. They show you've done your homework and contribute to what the SEO world calls E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Basically, they prove you know what you're talking about.

The manual process of finding and adding these links is simple enough, but let's be real, it can be a total grind. The good news is that modern tools can handle this for you. AI content platforms like the eesel AI blog writer don't just spit out text; they do the research and build your articles with proper external citations right from the start, saving you hours of tedious work.

What are external links (and why do they matter)?

An external link is just a hyperlink that points from your website to a page on a completely different domain. It's the opposite of an internal link, which points to another page on your own site.

I see in notion we can only link internal pages created within my notion account. How do I link to external websites for reference.. I am building a personal home page and want to have quick links to my recent courses, tutorials etc,, They are 5/6 links I daily use.

Reddit

Even though they sound simple, these little links carry a lot of weight. Here’s why they're a big deal for any serious content strategy:

• Boosting credibility and E-E-A-T: When you cite authoritative sources like academic studies, government websites, or well-known industry leaders, you're showing readers your claims are backed by evidence. It’s like showing your work on a math problem. This is especially important for what Google calls YMYL topics, such as financial advice or health information, where being accurate is everything.
• Helping Google understand context: The web is a massive network of information. By linking out to other relevant, high-quality resources, you help search engines figure out where your content fits into the bigger picture. This strengthens your topical relevance and shows Google you're a valuable part of the conversation.
• Improving the user experience: Your goal should always be to create the most helpful resource possible. Sometimes, that means pointing your reader to other great content that can give them more detail on a specific point. Providing these extra resources helps them learn more and positions your site as a trustworthy hub they'll want to come back to.

Strategic best practices for adding external links

Before we get into the step-by-step, it's important to get the strategy right. How you link is just as important as the fact that you link. A messy or thoughtless linking strategy can actually hurt your credibility and make for a clunky user experience.

Link to authoritative sources

This is the number one rule. Always link to high-quality, reputable websites that are the original source of the information you're citing. Don't just link to some random blog that's rehashing old data; find the original study or report.

A common question is whether you should link to competitors. Generally, you want to avoid linking to a direct competitor for your main keywords. However, you should absolutely link to non-competing, authoritative sources. Think educational institutions (.edu), government sites (.gov), research papers, or industry leaders who aren't direct rivals. Citing your sources is a fundamental way to establish trustworthiness with both users and search engines.

Write descriptive and natural anchor text

The anchor text is the clickable part of a link that the user sees. You want this text to be descriptive and tell the user (and Google) what to expect when they click.

Try to avoid generic phrases like "click here" or "read more." They don't give any context. Instead, use natural-sounding text that clearly describes where the link is going. For example, instead of "a study was done, click here," you could write "a study from Swiss researchers, this is the result." It's more informative and just flows better.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Using the right SEO link attributes

HTML gives us little instructions, or rel attributes, that we can add to our links to tell search engines how to treat them. These are important for keeping your SEO profile healthy, since you don't always want to pass your site's authority to every single place you link to.

Here are the most common attributes you'll see, as explained by SEO experts:

Open links in a new tab

This one is all about the user experience. When a user clicks an external link, you almost always want it to open in a new browser tab. You can do this by adding target="_blank" to the link's HTML. This keeps your website open in their original tab, so they don't lose their place and can easily come back.

However, there’s a small security risk with this called "tabnabbing", where the new page could potentially gain some control over your original page. It sounds scarier than it is, and the fix is super simple. Just add rel="noopener noreferrer" to any link that uses target="_blank". This prevents the security risk and protects your users. The good news is that most modern platforms, like WordPress, do this for you automatically.

Audit for broken links regularly

Over time, pages on other websites can get moved or deleted. When that happens, your link to them "breaks," leading to a 404 error page. This is sometimes called "link rot."

Broken links create a frustrating experience for your users and can be a negative signal to search engines. It's a good idea to periodically check your site for broken external links. You can use tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your site and find any links that need to be updated or removed.

How to add external links on different platforms

While the strategic principles are the same everywhere, the actual step-by-step process can look a little different depending on the platform you're using. Here’s a quick rundown for the most common tools.

Adding external links in a CMS like WordPress

If you're using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, the process is incredibly simple. In the block editor (Gutenberg), the workflow is usually:

1. Highlight the text you want to turn into a link.
2. Click the "link" icon in the toolbar that pops up (it looks like a little chain link).
3. Paste the URL you want to link to into the field.
4. Toggle the "Open in new tab" option if you want.

   

For a faster workflow, most people just use the universal keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+K on Windows or Cmd+K on Mac. Just highlight your text, hit the shortcut, and the link box will appear.

Adding external links in document editors like Google Docs

The process in document editors like Google Docs or Microsoft Word is nearly identical to WordPress. You highlight your text, click the "Insert link" icon in the main toolbar, and paste your URL.

The Ctrl+K/Cmd+K shortcut works here too, and it’s usually the fastest way to get it done. One cool feature in Google Docs is the ability to link to specific "bookmarks" within the same document. This is super helpful for creating a clickable table of contents or for easy navigation in really long articles.

Adding external links directly in HTML

Even if you use a visual editor, it’s helpful to know what’s going on behind the scenes. The basic HTML for a link is called an anchor tag, and it looks like this: <a href="URL">Anchor Text</a>.

To create a complete, secure external link that opens in a new tab, the full HTML would look like this:

<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Descriptive Anchor Text</a>

Again, you probably won't need to write this out by hand very often, as most modern editors handle all the attributes for you. But seeing the code helps you understand what each part does.

For a more visual walkthrough, the following video provides a clear demonstration of how to add external links in various content editors, covering the core principles we've just discussed.

A video explaining how to add external links to blogs and websites, covering best practices for SEO.

Automating external links with AI

Now that you know the why and the how, let's talk about the biggest challenge: scale.

The challenge of manual linking at scale

In a perfect world, you'd meticulously research every claim, find the original source, and add a perfectly crafted link for every blog post. But in reality, content production moves fast. Manually finding relevant, high-authority sources for every single article is incredibly time-consuming.

it would be much helpful if there's a built-in SEO optimization suggestions. Like, keyword placement, readability checks, or even recommendations of internal/external links (but I think external's more feasible on this). That would save so much time during the editing process

Reddit

This research phase is often the biggest bottleneck that stops teams from scaling their content creation. It's so tedious that some teams end up skipping external links altogether, which is a huge mistake that hurts their content's quality and credibility.

How the eesel AI blog writer helps

This is where AI can completely change your workflow. The eesel AI blog writer is designed to solve this exact bottleneck. It does way more than just generate text; it performs deep, context-aware research while it writes.

When you give it a topic, the AI doesn't just pull information from its training data. It actively finds and adds citations to credible external sources to support the claims it's making. This means you get a well-referenced, trustworthy article from the ground up, with linking best practices already built-in. It saves hours of manual research and ensures your content is always backed by evidence.

Beyond links: Generating complete, publish-ready content

Automating external links is a huge time-saver, but it's just one piece of the puzzle. The goal isn't just to write faster; it's to create better content that ranks.

The eesel AI blog writer takes a holistic approach. In addition to text and citations, it integrates other essential elements that make a blog post successful. This includes AI-generated images, custom infographics, comparison tables, and even authentic social proof by finding and embedding relevant Reddit quotes.

Instead of manually piecing together a blog post: writing the text, finding images, searching for sources, formatting tables: you get a complete, publish-ready article in minutes. It's optimized for both search engines and human readers, letting you focus on strategy instead of tedious execution.

External links are much more than a technical SEO task; they are a cornerstone of creating credible, authoritative content that users and search engines trust. A smart linking strategy: using descriptive anchor text, linking to high-quality sources, and using the right security attributes: is non-negotiable for anyone serious about content marketing.

But we also have to be realistic. The manual research and linking process is a massive bottleneck that prevents many teams from scaling their efforts.

This is where AI is changing the game. By automating the research and citation process, tools like eesel are allowing teams to produce high-quality, trustworthy, and well-cited content faster than ever before. You get the quality without the grind.

Ready to stop spending hours on research? Try eesel AI for free and generate your first publish-ready article with automatic citations today.