Outbound links? You read that right … you know … the links you put on your site or blog to other people’s sites. I don’t know about you but I believe in doing the “right” thing whenever possible … and in karma! LOL
I’m going to share what I’ve learned about outbound links and hopefully it will change the way you link to others … and maybe how they will link to you too.
Linking to someone else’s site is a great way to share other sites with your readers. If you are telling others about someone’s site it’s best to make an actual hyperlink to their site whenever possible (as opposed to just mentioning the site).
If you’re going to take the steps necessary to link to someone it’s even better to take the next step and learn about the effective use of anchor text. The anchor text is the word or phrase you use that will actually link over to the other person’s site. The reason this matters is that Google (search engines) looks at the word or phrase you use as an indicator of what the site is about.
For this blog you could link to http://www.suzannefranco.com and that would take your readers to my blog easily. If you wanted to help me out with the search engines you would use words instead of my URL.
So, now that you know what you should do let’s look at how to figure out the best words to use for the anchor text. If you know the person (and you have time) just ask them. You could say, “Hey, Suzanne I’m doing a blog post and I’ll be linking to you. What is the best anchor text to use?”
Another way is to go to the site and take a look the page title (meta title – not headlines). This can be found up in the very top left corner of the browser window. If the site owner has optimized their site there will be a key word phrase there. If you go to my blog you will see that my page title is “Money Making Ideas.” That would tell you that is one of the key word phrases that the blog is optimized for.
If you see something like “Home” … or even just the name of the blog or site you might go one step further and take a quick look at their meta key words and their meta description. While you are on their main page you will go up to your tool bar to the ”Page” and then to ”View Source.” This will open up the code for that page in NotePad for you. You should be able to get some good ideas there.
If you are not in the habit of linking to others it’s a good time to start. Not only is it valuable for your readers it’s also good for your own status with Google. It’s rumored that Google takes in to account the number of outbound links when determining your page rank.
I personally like to be helpful to others … it’s just in my nature … even if it means a little extra work. I will also say that this method has “paid off” for me as far as my sites go too. I’ve had people see my sites and/or blogs in their traffic stats and when they go to check out my site and see that I “properly” linked to them it usually results in some type of business friendship that flourishes.
I love hearing from you so please comment below and let me know if this was helpful and/or if you have any other strategies that would help others with outbound linking. *SmiLes* Suzanne
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Hi … My name is Suzanne Franco (Land) and I’m a wife (newlywed actually) and mother to 5 amazing kids (my 3 and his 2 – ages 9 to 16) and we live in the Texas Hill Country where we try to spend a lot of time in the water (river, boating, wakeboarding, the beach, etc.) and running from one kid’s sporting event to the other (mainly football, cheerleading, and soccer).
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Great Blog, I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. How do I use html to get the words to link instead of using the url address?
Thanks,
Kim
Hi Kim ~ Thanks for your comment and for bookmarking my blog. I’m in the process of adding RSS hopefully this week.
To answer your question the html code you would use would be:
*Please note: I can’t figure out how to get the rel=”nofollow” out of there … so you would take that out of there. Let me know if you need help
And here’s how it will show up:
Kimmiloo
The anchor text is Kimmiloo and it would be a link to your blog.
Let me know if that helps and if you have any more questions. *hugs* Suzanne
P.S. *gentle hugs* I have fibro too
Thanks Suzanne, that does answer my question. I’m sorry to hear you have Fibro also ((( gentle hugs )))
Kim.
You have made an interesting yet overlooked points of outbound links. You’ll surprised that many always want to be on the receiving end but not the opposite.
In moderation, I will try to link out to others whenever possible. It’s a great source of traffic especially when the trackback is in place.
Well, “giving is receiving”; it depends on how you look at it.
Yan