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Can Linking to Other People’s Sites Actually Help You Get More Traffic?


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If you’re looking at optimizing your website for the search engines to help boost your Google page ranking and get more visitors, you are probably already aware that the more inbound links there are to your pages elsewhere on the web the better.  These backlinks are a crucial part of SEO, whether they appear on social media and social bookmarking sites, on other site’s permanent links pages, or in the comments.  However, it may come as a surprise to learn that putting outward links to other people’s content can also help.  Here we will look at why.

Search Engines Prefer Sites with Outbound Links

While it might seem counter intuitive, linking to other sites helps you get more visitors, and adds value to the visitors that you do get.  Google recognizes sites with plenty of links to other sites as useful resources for its users, because ‘spammy’, ‘salesy’ sites don’t tend to think about this and want to keep their visitors on their sites with nothing to entice them to leave.  This approach is short sighted – if your content is good enough people will stay to read it, and giving them a list of other useful and relevant pages gives them more reason to come back for more, or bookmark you.  If you are especially worried about your links pulling people away from your site before they’ve seen enough, you could set all links to open in a new tab or window, keeping yours open while visitors browse the sites you recommend.

Linking to Authority Sites Boosts Your Credibility

Google, and other search engines, give high weight to sites that link to high profile, authority sites.  Good examples include major news and media outlets, such as cnn.com, and sites from big networks like Yahoo and MSN.  Any site that is extremely well known or highly esteemed (including government, medical and academic authority sites) as a source of information is a good site to link to, and it is very easy to slip these sorts of links into your posts naturally.

If you are talking about a news story, it is effective to add some links to coverage of the story on a few newspaper and television network websites.  This shows you are researching your content properly, giving people the chance to learn more, and giving proper credit to your sources, all of which are things that add to your site’s credibility, both with its readers and the search engines.

Linking to Other Bloggers Builds Your Network and Earns You Reciprocal Backlinks

Adding a permanent links page on your site not only gives your site a place where you can show a little of your personality by linking to some cool stuff that your readers might enjoy, but can also be somewhere for you to promote the blogs of friends or other people who work in your niche or industry.  The great thing about a links page is you can categorize it, so you can even put in some links to things that are off the usual topic of your site, just because you like them.  You can then offer people whose blogs you like a link on your page in return for a link to yours on their site.  This helps you build relationships with other bloggers, in addition to giving you a new source of traffic and additional backlinks.

In order to build up an authority website in your niche however you will need some fantastic content.  If you need some help why not contact Apple Copywriting?  Apple Copywriting offers a variety of copywriting services that can help your website succeed.

You Are In Charge Easy WebContent provides easy and powerful tools to manage and empower websites.  It gives the user control to edit an existing or build a new professional website.  VisitEasyWebContent.com today to begin your free 7-day trial period!

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One Response to Can Linking to Other People’s Sites Actually Help You Get More Traffic?

  1. Press Release Distribution says:

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