The Power of Outbound Linking in SEO

For those not familiar with the term; ‘outbound linking’ means placing links on your own site, which point to other websites. We all understand the power of inbound links, which help to classify and raise the search rank of your website in relation to its direct competition, but the power of outbound linking is often overlooked when we set about optimizing our website for search engines.

Just like inbound links, which suggest an individual’s confidence in the quality of content on your website, outbound links allow you to demonstrate your own confidence in the quality of content on a rival’s website. Sounds like a bad idea? Not when you factor in the power of popularity by association. Your website might not be the biggest or the best, but if it’s linking to sites with high page ranks it’ll be significantly easier for search engines to categorize and rank your site based upon the content of the popular sites you are linking to.

You can be even smarter with it too. Say you have a website which sells local groceries by delivery, quietly linking to national super market websites won’t affect your own custom, but it will tell the search engines exactly what type of service you are providing. To the search engine, your service is now associated with national food retail and becomes a priority entry whenever a customer does a search for something like ‘local produce’.

This popularity by association technique can be applied to almost any business; tattoo removal, corporate team building events organisers, car insurance, and so on. The key is to create outbound links to very large websites which provide similar services to the ones you are selling!

Give it a try on your own website! You can set up a page which you either publicise or keep quiet, but be sure to include a good handful of outbound links to relevant or competing websites, see how long it takes before that link page is mysteriously ranked more highly than other relevant pages of your site. You’ll be amazed at the power of outbound linking.