Linking out is a tough question to ask. You always have to ask yourself before linking to another website, “What will my site visitors gain from this link?”

Keep in mind that any link out of your website has strong potential to send visitors elsewhere. You really want to keep them on your website, right? Well, yes, but there are times when you might want to link out to other sites. But when and where?

First, never link to another site from your home page. Home page real estate is such valuable real estate that you don’t want the first thing your site visitors see is a link to another website. That’s like an invitation to leave. Don’t open the doors for them.

When you do link from your site to another website, make sure that it’s for the right reasons. You don’t want to link out if it provides no value to your users. You’ll also want to think twice before linking to your competition. That seems intuitive, but some new webmasters will do it because they heard that linking out can give you more authority. You have to really think about who you will link to, and why.

Before you start building outbound links from your website to others, consider these questions:

• Is this link valuable to my site visitors?
• Am I sending site visitors to the competition (even third-party sites can be a careful disguise for the competition; check to see who sponsors it)
• Is there a way I can gain an inbound link, or reciprocal link, from this exchange?
• Would it hurt my business if this link is clicked on a lot?
• Who, ultimately, does this link benefit?

There are two extremes with regard to outbound linking that you should stay away from: Excessive outbound linking and no outbound linking whatsoever. There are times when you’ll want to and shouldn’t, times when you don’t want to and should, and times when it is crystal clear that you shouldn’t. But you should always give due consideration to your motives for linking out and consider who it stands to benefit.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: competition, links, website development

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 4:24 am and is filed under Marketing Tips, website design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.