Outbound links

Outbound links for your SEO strategy

Do you know what Outbound links is? Or what we call outbound links? You probably know what an outbound link is, but have you considered including it in your SEO strategy?

Maybe you've realised that this is important but haven't yet had the courage to start implementing it in your SEO strategy because you're unsure of how to get the best results.

It is a misunderstood factor In the SEO industry, it's only inbound links that increase your rankings in SERPs. We all know that inbound links/back links are important for your website and organic results, but it's equally important that you try to understand how outbound links can be a dominant factor Likewise.

This post will help you to understand the importance for outbound links in your SEO strategy.

This post contains: 

What are outbound links?

Benefits of outbound links

Link to relevant blogs

Avoid splog networks

Avoid spam from outbound links

Give-and-take link system

Who should you link to?

What are outbound links?

Outbound links are links that point to another domain from your website. When you link out to related domains, it not only helps the search engine understand your niche, but also helps increase the trust and quality of your website, which plays a crucial role in the rankings your article/website ends up having in the SERP.

In short, there are a number of benefits to linking out, including

• Gives search engines a clear idea of your blog based on relevant outbound links.
• The best way to connect with professionals working in the same niche.

Benefits of outbound links from an SEO perspective:

Before I describe the general benefits of outbound links, I'd like to introduce you to Google's "related link tool". Just like everyone else using Google as a search engine, you can use Google's related link tool to see which links are relevant to your website according to Google! In other words, you can see how Google understands your website.

If it's perfect, the result of such a search will show a list of the most popular and informative websites in your particular niche.

If you want to do a "related" search in Google and see which links Google thinks are relevant to your website, do the following:

Open Google in your browser and enter: related:domain.dkand you will see the related links.

This is a search for DBA. Here Google shows that related links are guloggratis and bilbasen. This also makes sense as it is within the same niche, so dba has a good starting point.

If you run a search for your website and the results look somewhat misleading, it could be due to a number of reasons:

If you have many spam linksthat are "related" to your site according to Google, then it's time to start Tidy up in your links. If this is the case, you probably have a lot of inbound links from irrelevant domains. The amount of outbound links that help Google understand what your site is about is probably also lacking, which you should change.

Now that you have a basic idea of why outbound links are so important, let's look at the things you should consider when linking out.

Link to relevant blogs!

When you start creating outbound links to other sites, it doesn't mean that it's all about getting as many outbound links as possible. It also doesn't mean that you should seek out "bad neighbours". In other words, it's important that you link to relevant domains that don't harm your own position.

Try to keep your outbound links within blogs and sites that have the same niche as your own site. This will help you attract targeted visitors to your blog. If you also link to domains that already have a high domain rating and high authority with Google, it increases credibility even more.

Avoid splog networks

Avoid two-way backlinks. When linking to a domain, make sure it's not part of a private blog network. After the recent Google panda updates Google has cracked down on such private blog networks and devalued their links. Therefore, it is important that you are critical when you link out. However, you will typically be able to see this at first glance. If not, you should run it through a link checking tool to get a better overview.

Avoid having too many outbound links

Having some outbound links is fine. Both for the reader, but also for the search engines' understanding of your content. But having too many outbound links can be annoying for your reader and you should try to keep it at a level where it makes sense.

Try to concentrate more on internal link building (read 7 simple steps) and then only link out to websites that are relevant to your site.

Link to fewer and only relevant blogs. There are some sites that link out to e.g. "Top 100 website design", "20 blogs to follow" or other similar sites that rank well despite using more outbound links. In a regular post/article, we want to minimise the use of outbound links, primarily to make it reader-friendly for the user.

The most important thing for your readers to stay on your site is good content and on-page SEO.

Give-and-take link system

When running a blog, it is beneficial to utilise the so-called "give-and-take system". If you have a good blog post on a topic where you refer to another author's blog post, primarily to give your content as much meaning as possible, thereby deepening it with someone else's knowledge on a topic, then you need to link to the other blog post.
This will first and foremost improve your rankings and content as it becomes easier to understand, but it also gives you the opportunity to exchange links with other blogs. Swapping links in this way is link exchange and is useful for bringing targeted traffic to both blogs.

Who should you link to?

There are many strategies you can follow to create outbound links. One of the methods that you can utilise in a situation where you are not quite sure who to link to is to link to sites like Wikipedia. (Yes! Wikipedia is still one of the most trusted domains by Google!)

Here are a few suggestions for making some outbound links:

• Link to sites that actually add value and cover the topic well
• Link to articles that have credibility at Google
• Link to articles that have received a lot of attention on social media (you should still be critical of the relevance of the content here)
• Link to bloggers in your network or in your niche. It helps you build a community with other bloggers.

We often use a strategy when working with outbound links in our articles and blog posts that we have seen positive results from. Simply put, when you write a post where you use words that are used in the industry but are not familiar to your readers, you link to a good and reliable source for the word used. This gives the reader the most value possible. However, we still have the bounce rate in mind and your outbound links should open in a new tab.

I've noticed that most top ranking pages in Google have at least a few outbound links to relevant and high-ranking pages that help them increase their ranking.

I hope you're now ready to dive into working with outbound links.