Outbound Links
Cross Linking Builds Link Popularity
Many webmasters are extremely reluctant to put links to other websites on their own site. The argument is that they don’t want people to leave their site. The problem is that by doing this, your site exists in a vacuum, and can lose link popularity. Ultimately, this decision is up to you, but outbound links are an important element to boosting your position. Remember, one of your main goals is to link to others and have them link to you.
Who To Link To
Believe it or not, the best thing you could do for building link popularity it to link out to your competition, and have them link to you. The reason is that your competition will likely be categorized the same as you, so you will gain points for ‘common interest’. Naturally, you are not likely to do this. Still, you should try to provide links of interest to the people that visit your site. Chances are that these will help more than some random sites.
Linking Out And Bringing People Back
As mentioned above, you don’t want to lose visitors by linking away from your site. The answer to this problem is to open all outbound links in a new window, so the user still has a browser window on your page.
You can do this by setting the target to “blank” as follows:
<a href=”www.otherdomain.com” target=”_blank”>Outbound Link</a>