Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Outgoing Links

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Com­pleted So Far:

One of the most pow­er­ful tech­niques for gen­er­ate good search engine results for a blog or  a web­site is to include good qual­ity links in the con­tent of your site. There are three types of links that you can add to your website/blog that will attract search engine bots and spiders:

1. inter­nal links
2. out­go­ing links, and
3. incom­ing links.

Inter­nal Links were dis­cussed in the last post. This post pro­vides a brief overview of Out­go­ing Links.

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New Devel­op­ments:

Out­go­ing links are hyper­text links that point to some­one else’s website/blog, and are the sec­ond type of link that you, as the author of your website/blog, have con­trol over.

Basi­cally, the best way to use out­go­ing links is in the same way as you would add ref­er­ences to an aca­d­e­mic essay, or to a busi­ness report. For exam­ple, if Cath Dun­can had made a point on her Bottom-line Book­club blog that I wanted to incor­po­rate into this post, I would hyper­text link the words “Bottom-line Book­club” as they were being used in the con­tent of my blog.

Or I would include a com­ment, like “For more infor­ma­tion, check out the Bottom-Line Book­club at http://www.bottomlinebookclub.com, with the URL hyper­text linked to the Bottom-line Bookclub’s website.

A cou­ple of guide­lines to keep in mind when includ­ing out­go­ing hyper­text links in your blog’s content:

1. always include the ‘http://’ part of the URL. If you don’t, then the link won’t work. I’ve for­got­ten to add the ‘http://’ a cou­ple of times and ended up being really frus­trated that the link wasn’t working!!
2. always incor­po­rate the hyper­text links into the con­tent of your blog — don’t cre­ate a list of links at the end on your blog, or on a sep­a­rate page. Spi­ders and bots assume that you are just ‘link load­ing’ your website/blog with links that are irrel­e­vant to your site’s con­tent — and spider’s and bot’s don’t like that.
3. try to use key­words around this type of hyper­text link. This com­bi­na­tion adds empha­sis to your key­words that increase the like­li­hood of search engine spider’s and bots iden­ti­fy­ing your keywords.

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Next Step:

The last type of link, the Incom­ing Link, is the most dif­fi­cult type of link to gen­er­ate on a blog, and, of course, it is the most impor­tant type of link as far as attract­ing the atten­tion of search engine spi­ders and bots is con­cerned. The next post, due to be pub­lished on Mon­day, will look at ways of devel­op­ing ‘link bait’ to attract these incom­ing links, and a few other tips, tricks, and guidelines.

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If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Opti­miz­ing Your Blog from the begin­ning by going to the Intro­duc­tion post.

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