Outbound Link Strategy

You probably spend a lot of time collecting links from other websites. Those inbound links are important because they affect your website's search engine rank and bring in new human visitors.

However, you shouldn't ignore the importance of your website's outbound links. A number of quality outbound links from a Web page can also increase search rank because they indicate that the website is an "authority" on a particular topic.

Links To Internal Pages - Outbound links can link to pages within your website or to external websites.

Linking to different pages or sections within the same website is often referred to as "cross linking" and we'll use that term here to differentiate between outbound links to pages within the same website and outbound links that go to different websites entirely.

A navigation menu is just one way to crosslink pages in your website. Other methods include:

• Alternate text links at the bottom of every page. These are necessary if your navigation menu is image-based or designed using JavaScript or Flash. They're also useful on pages that contain a lot of content because visitors can select a different page without scrolling back up to the main menu.
  
  
• Text links within page content. These allow visitors to immediately get more information about that particular subject. Make sure the links stand out from surrounding content. Use CSS to highlight links if you decide to remove the underlining. Also include a TITLE attribute to further describe the link's destination.
  
  
• Obvious link to your sitemap. On very large or complex websites, a text-based sitemap is a great way for visitors to find what they're looking for. Search engine spiders love sitemaps too because they make website indexing easier.

Your goal with all these cross links is to give visitors a sense of what's available on the website and help them access content quickly.