Does Linking Out Help Your Website?

What are you doing to market your website? Have you considered linking out from your site? A lot of people focus so much on linking in that they forget about adding links to their site that feed to other high quality sites. We know that links are able to generate traffic and aid in boosting your ranking but what exactly does linking out do? Is it good or bad? Should you start changing the "no follow" rule on your Wordpress page? Here is some information you need to know about linking out.

Is linking out going to hurt my site?
The simple answer is NO. The search engines are always changing and in the past one of the things that did hurt your credibility was having too many links out from your site. Now the rules have changed and when you link out it can help as it shows the customers that you are considering their needs as they read the content on your site. While you don't need to have a ton of links in your content, a few links here and there that aid in educating your customers are appreciated and can help to boost your credibility in the eyes of the customers. Customers appreciate it when you link out to help them instead of linking out to generate pay per click leads for your advertisers.

Link out to quality sources
When you focus on linking out, do it to sites that are valued. The search engines know which sites are spam and which ones are legitimate. You need to link out your website to sources that are going to be valuable to your customers and will give them some type of helpful resource to use. If you link out to spam sites, it will actually hurt your credibility with the search engines and they may end up un-listing you from their directory!

Non profit sites are usually ones that are considered "authority" by the search engines and they are usually as safe bet to link to. The EDU sites are also good ones to link to and some of them even allow you to link back to their site with articles and other things. Just be sure that you are linking to relative content and that they are linking back to relative pages on your site as well. Focus on improving the landing page on your site if you find that it is not providing you with leads that you need.

When you link out you can get links back!
A lot of companies will see that you are linking to them and in return for your kindness they may link back to you. This is a commonly used SEO tactic. As long as you are linking to a site that is going to help your customers in some way, you will be able to get some quality rankings from the site and it's going to provide you with credibility.

Keep it natural
You need to be the person that is choosing the outbound links. Do not allow a bot or a generated program to do it for you. This is where you will end up with spam issues and the search engines will not appreciate it. Try to keep your outbound links to 1-2 per every 500 words that you write. This way you are not flooding the customers with too many links to click on as they review the content that you are writing. Just remember your customer's needs when you are linking and try to give them something that is valuable instead of giving them links that they will not need.