So much emphasis is placed on the SEO value of inbound links (also known as backlinks) these days that it is often easy to neglect the importance of outbound links on your site. Outbound links, first and foremost, serve to make your site a more useful and comprehensive resource for its users. As an example, let’s presume that you are a small manufacturer of bicycles, your visitors would certainly expect to find a list of local dealers where your products can be purchased. By providing this information, you are also helping to establish the value of your site as an informational “hub”, one of several factors that come into play in determining your site’s overall search engine positioning.

To maximize the value of the links (and, consequently, the impact upon your search engine ranking), any such outbound links should follow certain rules of thumb:

• The outbound links should be relevant to the content of your site and the page upon which they appear.
• The links should be anchored to keywords within the text within the page. For example, either “Pelland Advertising provides website development services for small businesses” or “Pelland Advertising provides website development services for small businesses” is preferable to “Click here to learn more about Pelland Advertising’s website development services for small businesses.”
• Links that are anchored to text are more valuable than links that are anchored to graphics.
• Do not include more than a maximum of 50 outbound links on a page.
• Linking to high ranking sites will do you far more good than linking to sites which are relatively unknown to the major search engines.
• Do not buy links or exchange links with “link farms”.
• Be sure that your links are active and up-to-date.

This last point is often overlooked. A fine page of links which is put together in January may be full of errors by July. It is important to check your link pages on a periodic basis and to make corrections as they become necessary. Fortunately, there is a very easy way to accomplish this. The W3C Link Checker is an excellent freeware tool which will find all of the broken links within a page, including graphics and URL’s which refresh to other pages. This online validator from the W3 Consortium is able to recursively check your document for dead links. Simply go to the W3C Link Checker site, enter the full URL of the page that you want to check, and click the “Check” button. It will check every link on the page, generating a color-keyed report that will show you the corrections that need to be made.

Aside from the SEO advantages and the site usability benefits which you will be offering to your visitors, keeping broken links off of your site simply makes your business look more professional and perceptive.

One last note: If you have a robots.txt file within the meta tags on your page, it will typically show the “index,follow” attributes. Double check to be sure that your page is not using the “nofollow” attribute if you have outbound links on the page and you would like to maximize the benefit of the outbound links to the linked sites.