Paddy Moogan Blog

SEO Tip #4 Link Out to Good Quality “Authority” Websites

23rd August 2009 · Paddy · 2 Comments »

This tip is something which has been around for a while now in the SEO world but surprisingly few people actually do this.  Many website owners hate the thought of linking out to other websites and often think they will lose visitors and sales by doing this.

However if you think in terms of SEO, your objective is to create a website that is a useful resource for visitors and provides a good user experience.  If you not only provide good content on your own site, but also link out to other very useful content on external websites, then you are providing an excellent user experience because you are helping users find the information they want.

How you link out to these sites is also important, don’t try to hide the links away on a remote page that users (and the search engines) are unlikely to ever find.  At the same time you don’t want to put them in a place where they are going to distract users from taking the action you want on your own website.  So a little balance is required here.

In terms of choosing which websites to link to, I tend to make sure I link to websites which are always higher PageRank than my own and making sure that these websites show up highly in the search engines for popular, broad keywords.  Obviously don’t link to competitor websites!

Good examples of authority websites could be:

• Government/local council websites
• University article websites
• Wikipedia pages
• Official law documents
• Large well known sites such as the BBC/CNN

The idea is always that you are making your own website a good resource for your users.  The search engines will notice this and rank you accordingly.