I established in my previous post about an outbound link strategy, that you can’t be selfish about link giving.  Nonetheless, as you link to useful information on other websites, you should be doing the same for your partner websites – just make sure that the material you’re linking to is relevant in and of itself, not just because you created it. A successful strategy will have a mixture of linking out and linking within.

A great place to start with in-site linking is with blog posts.  If you link new posts to relevant previous posts, this will help index your site’s keywords with the engines.

Pay attention to the words used as the link anchor text.  The words that you choose for the link can help you and the site you’re linking to with SEO.  As for outbound links, some experts say that if you link to high-ranking sites for the keywords that you are targeting, it will have more impact.

For in interesting case study in outbound linking, check out Michael Gray’s SEO blog.

It concludes that it is best not to link out from pages that you want to rank for a particular term, but if you have to, use words other than your desired keyword as the anchor text.

A favored tool for analyzing SEO keywords is Google Analytics.  You can use it to get down to the nitty-gritty on your outgoing link strategy.

Again, never lose sight of the goal.  A link is made to bring the useful information to a reader in the same content stream.

By: Ilene Rosenblum