Webmasters continually fail to appreciate the value of outbound links from their website and their effect on search engine rankings. You don’t have to leave it entirely to a SEO company to understand what is needed to help you boost the significance of those outbound links.
One of the most obvious ways that outbound links can have some effect on website optimising is through anchor text. Both outbound and inbound links’ anchor text has the same sort of effect on the search engines’ rankings. Of the two different sources inbound links’ anchor text no doubt has the greatest weighting when it comes to search engine rankings. For example if the term “vague sentence” appears in the inbound anchor text linked to your web page then that whole term will get a mention in SERP’s even if neither the keyword “vague” or the keyword “sentence” happened to have appeared in any of your web pages.
The anchor text of outbound links acts in the same sort of way although as stated already doesn’t have quite the same weighting as inbound links’ anchor text. A specific keyword in the anchor text of a webpage link can result in that particular webpage showing up in the search engine results even when it is the only place that it appears and even if there are no inbound links for that particular anchor text.
If you are not sure whether this is a valid argument or not have a look at your own website traffic logs. Locate the search engine traffic to specific pages on your site. You are most likely to find a lot of traffic for search strings that have originated in the anchor text of your own outbound links.
Listed below are three things you should or should not do when it comes to putting links on your site.
Don’t just limit your website links to your own site or at best to the web designer or your web host. Make sure there are relevant links to other sites. You will find that this is a fairly widespread fault amongst a lot of commercial websites. Search engine algorithms find it hard to take these sites too seriously when the only links are to pages within the site itself.
Make sure that you have links to other web sites that have relevance to your own. If your own website has any real value, then of course it will have extra links to other sites that have real value too. This is recognised by the search engines and informative inclusive sites get the nod ahead of sites that are simply blowing their own trumpet.
Don’t include links that have no relevance to your website. If for instance you have an online business that sells gardening equipment, there’s not a lot of point in putting links on your homepage to rental villas in the Costa Del Sol! What happens if you do something like this is that the search engine algorithm gets a little stumped and decides to put the whole website well off the rankings. There are plenty of websites that make a case for either rental villas in the Costa del Sol or for gardening supplies in England, so it might as well treat them with more seriousness!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 at 11:08 am.
