One of the most effective ways to improve your website’s organic search engine position is to increase the quantity and quality of both inbound and outbound links to established, highly rated sites. As an added benefit, any inbound links are going to directly increase the amount of traffic from the referring sites which provide the links. Too many people obsess over the concept of “reciprocal links”, and this is unfortunate. Whether or not another site provides a reciprocal link is not nearly as important as the links themselves, even if they are one-way links. Let us take a separate look at inbound and outbound links.

Outbound links from your site to another site should provide your visitors with sources of additional information that relates to your business or your site’s content. Let’s say that you own a business that sells small kitchen appliances, it would be a good idea to provide links to the manufacturers that you represent, independent product reviews, and general consumer information on the various appliances. By doing so, you are enhancing the usefulness of your site to its visitors (and lessening the likelihood that they might choose to turn elsewhere … perhaps a competitor … for that same information). Simply by association with these sites, your site’s own search engine ranking will improve.

There are a few guidelines when setting up outbound links:
1) Setup the links to open in new tabs or browser windows so that your visitors do not lose track of their point of origin.
2) When choosing outbound links, try to find sites that are, in themselves, highly search rated. A good reference is a site’s “PageRank”, as indicated by the Google Toolbar that you should have installed on your browser. (It’s free!) Try to choose businesses that have a PageRank that is as high or higher than your own.
3) Links that are anchored to text (such as my Google Toolbar link, above) are more valuable than links that are anchored to graphics. If possible, use the two in conjunction.
4) Links that relate to the content that appears on the linking page is more valuable than more general links.
5) Do not include more than a maximum of 50 outbound links on a page.

Inbound links from other sites to yours are even more important. Most of the same guidelines still apply. Every link counts when determining your search engine ranking, as long as it appears on a recognized page of a highly rated site. What you don’t want (but probably cannot prevent) are incoming links from so-called “link farms” which are trying to build their own search engine ranking by capitalizing upon their outbound links to your sites and hundreds of others, typically with totally unrelated content. Obtaining inbound links from the same websites to which you are supplying outbound links should be one of your top priorities, particularly if their websites are more highly rated than your own. The appliance manufacturers, for example, may have links to “where to buy our products”. Try to insure that your business is not only listed but that there is a link to your website. Inbound links from any directories that relate to your business should be your next priority. Don’t forget to include blogs, and even appropriate MySpace and Facebook pages. Whatever effort you put into link creation today will pay dividends tomorrow. In difficult economic times, I can’t think of a better way of helping to insure your continuing success.

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.