Here’s the thing: Most people don’t want to link out from their website because they’re worried that it’s going to steal their link juice. They’re paranoid that they’re going to lose their precious juice. Oh, my precious. (Yes, obvious Lord of the Rings reference here.) Funny thing with this is that if you don’t link out, how are people going to know about you?

Seriously, are they going to happen upon you from Google randomly? Not bloody likely if you’ve just put up your site…thanks sandbox, you’re the best! You need to link out to sites to get noticed and get on the radar of Google (other search engines too, but Google’s the big beast on the block).

However, you should still be selective with who you link to, don’t just link to anyone. When you’re linking out, you should link to authoritative resource sites — meaning sites beneficial to your users. SEO is, fundamentally, all about the user experience.

Just like how a good report will cite its sources, if you know something will benefit your readers, link out to it! Once you do this, the people who you’ve linked to will see your link, visit your site and see what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario from that is that this person does nothing, no big deal; at least you got another viewer that day. Best-case scenario, this new viewer likes what you’re doing, becomes a loyal reader and maybe even link back to you.

That, my friends, is what link love is all about — you gotta give it to get it.

Tags: link love, linking strategies, search engine strategies, SEO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under Link Strategies, SEO. 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.