- Outbound Links – There is debate over how SEs treat outbound links from your blog. I’m in the camp who believe that relevant outbound links enhance your site’s ranking in search engines. I always link out to quality relevant sites that I think my readers will find useful and have a little anecdotal evidence that seems to support the theory that this is healthy for the way SEs index you (check out Waynes article on the topic for more info). Linking to sites outside your own blog does mean you end up sending traffic away from your blog so you need to count the cost of such a strategy. Note that you should always try to link to reputable and relevant sites to your own page. Also keep in mind that too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Like in most things in SEO – moderation is the key.
- Choose your domain name wisely – there are numerous factors to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. For one you might like to include your keyword in it if possible. Secondly you should do a little research to see if someone else has previously used the domain. This could have both positive and negative impact. If it was a quality site with inbound links you might reap some benefits but if it was a banned spam site you could still be banned from Google for a long time. One service you might want to use to check expired domains is Way Back Machine at Archive.org.
This just one of numerous posts in the Search Engine Optimization Tips for Blogs Series
Makes me wonder whether wrapping all your outbounds in a blogroll & shrinking them to one line of code in your template does you harm when the robots come….
Choosing “the right” anchor text for outbound links is helpful too. If you can’t be the “authority” try to be “the hub”.
It is always worth linking to relevant sites that are beneficial to your users. But at the same time you do not want 100 links in one post.
Another thing to consider when purchasing a domain name is the length. You do not want a domain name that is too long and hard to remember.
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It can be very detrimental to your traffic to change over your domain name midstream.
I did this but I tried to do it early in the piece. The second time around I made sure that I picked the right domain name for the long run. I chose http://www.smarterwealth.net for my financial blog.
What do you think of my domain name?
Good post, I do think that posting and linking to relevant reputable websites will make your site stronger in the search engines because if this was not the case everyone would end up being like most of the large sites today. If Google and the other search engines dont start putting more important in to the outbound links that are displayed on people’s websites other sites will never grow.