March 25th, 2010 by Susie

Getting inbound links from high authority sites is the key priority for almost all link building strategies, but outgoing links do have a place in SEO. Their use is a bit more subtle but every weapon in the search engine optimization armoury is worth using. Link swapping with sites of similar quality is rarely worth it, but there are other things you can do with outbound links.

First, a note of caution. An outbound link is a door marked ‘Exit’, so directing much of a user’s attention to them is something you should think carefully before doing. As with inbound links, exercise tight quality control. Linking to lower quality sites or those with questionable affiliations is a bad idea. If a candidate is unknown to you (and things like industry hubs and discussion sites should be very familiar indeed or your social media marketing strategy needs attention) check them out with a few of our free SEO tools and also see where they come up in Google SERPs for a few appropriate search terms. Those terms might not necessarily be the same as you would use to find your own site.

The first outbound links you should put in place are those your users might appreciate. Informational sites are great because they add a little extra value without competing for market share. Target content you can’t provide yourself or something that is outside your remit but still relevant. Be selective, but there is probably plenty out there that fit the criteria.

Offering a link is also a way of getting noticed by high authority sites. Send a message to the admin of a popular blog, for example, and ask politely if it would be ok for you to link to them. Provide reasons why it would be useful to your customers. Even if they say no, you have now established contact with a useful person.

Links to social media hubs are easy to arrange. Pick a relevant forum thread or room and link to it. That provides a little present for your users and also gets them into the forum. Friendly customers will do your social media marketing for you if you get them to the right place in the right frame of mind. It’s hard to overstate the importance of SMM, and getting site users to participate in it is wonderful if you can set it up.

You should also give your customers easy access to social bookmarking sites like digg.com as part of a SMM and SEO strategy. These are the exception to the outbound link rules in two ways. First, put them on the main page and make them obvious. Second, this is probably the one time when an image based link is better than a text based one. The icons for Digg, Twitter, and other popular social media sites are ubiquitous and well recognised. Most users will know what they are and what they mean, and from there it’s a short leap to clicking and leaving you a helpful digg or a positive piece of SMM.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.