With the art of search engine optimization comes many challenges and procedures, with most basic optimization methods focused on keyword saturation and inbound links. It is with this focus that many people neglect to mention the purpose and benefits of having outgoing or outbound links on your site. These types of links help create new relationships with other sites and this process has in many aspects turned former competitors into cooperating partners. For those of you who wish to understand more about the basic concept of outgoing links, these tips will guide you in the right direction.

What Outgoing Links Do For The Target

In the olden days of search engine optimization, one of the biggest ways to rise to the top of search results was to have the most outgoing links on other sites pointing to your site. In other words, the more links, the higher your ranking would be. Since then, search engine algorithms have become more complex but similar sentiments are still integrated within Panda and other SEO-related ranking systems. As a site owner, you want to have tons of links pointing to your site as it will increase both PageRank and traffic and it is a good way for search engines to determine if your site is a legitimate source of information, commerce or other content.

What Outgoing Links Do For You

There are certainly less benefits for you to host a link to an external site, but the act of doing so can reap bigger rewards. There are many websites on virtually all subjects that have notoriety and authority among search engines and yet maintain a grounded understanding of how traffic and online relationships can be a net positive. If you provide a link to a given website that is related to your site and then contact the webmaster, you very well may be able to score a link on their site to yours, which will give you added authority. This is not a sure bet but can be done on a case-by-case basis.

Easy Way to Score Outgoing Links

There are plenty of high ranking sites on the internet that you can use to score quality outgoing links on their sites that point to yours (which would be an incoming link from your site’s perspective). There are press release sites, comment sections on highly-read newspapers and online portals and many other assorted sites. Check out Alexa and its ranking system to get an idea of the most trafficked websites on the internet and proceed to explore each to determine which ones are suitable for your URL.

Learn From The Competition

If you are curious as to which outgoing links your competitors have, then try out Pingler’s Link Extractor Tool, which will isolate and display all outgoing links from any given website into an easy to read text box. From here, you can check out each site and even get ideas as to which sites may be doing reciprocal linking with your competitor. This will help you find potential sites that you can link with to boost your own PageRank and traffic with only a reasonably small amount of effort.