Sunday, May 13, 2007

Importance Of Outbound Links

Nowadays most blog owners focus on getting inbound links to their blogs. By having a outbound link to another site, you are somehow voting for that site - thats how PageRank works. So why you should help other sites and link to them? Actually, by carefully linking to other relevant sites, you are increasing the relevancy of your own site. As the search engine spider returns the information about your site to database to be processed in the algorithm, it has pre-sorted some search results based on the links your site points to.

Another benefit of outbound linking is Geo Targeting, or Local search. There is a lot of speculation that local search is the next big trend in Search Marketing. While only time will tell, it won't hurt to have your physical address listed on your website for those who will be embracing local search.

As an experiment, Paul Bliss tells how he created a site with a very unique url (to avoid the possibility of people finding it by accident), and he made it only 1 page long. The only thing the page consisted of were 80+ outbound links to relevant sites in the SEO industry, tools, forums and some tutorials. When the PageRank was first updated for the site, it came out of the box with a PR of 3. It has since fallen to a PR of 2 (now that he has pointed a few sites to it!).

The whole point of this experiment was to see how outbound links affect your own rankings of your site. Paul was able to generate a PR of 2 based entirely on linking to authority sites in the SEO industry. So, take the time to link to some relevant sites, the big names (if any), and enjoy the power of the easy, outbound link.

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