Link-Building: Should you link to other websites in your blog?

Several years ago when I first started blogging, I made a mistake that I see many first time bloggers make. My blog posts were very short, often just a couple of sentences with a link to another website. In essence, my blogging was simply about sharing cool websites and interesting ideas that I found on the web.

While that is fine in the short term it did nothing to build my web-presence and readership nor to develop web content of my own. Later, I swung to the opposite extreme. I began writing long, content-rich posts with few links to outside websites. This was more useful as it helped me to develop readership, gain more incoming links and generally develop my ideas.

However, I think it is important to link OUT to other websites. Linking to other websites can help bring you more traffic, more links and get others to read your content. Below is partial analysis from Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ on why you should link out:

1. You tend to get more links coming back in
2. Your domain and pages appear in the referral analytics of other sites, inviting site owners (who are often very likely “linkerati”) to check out your site
3. The search engines have at least looked into algorithms that reward external linking behavior
4. Karma - and not just the invisible, metaphysical kind - bloggers really do look at who links out and who doesn’t and they tend to reward the more generous
more of this post by Rand

And if you like to see stastical analysis on web-topics, consider the link below that shows some small evidence that the more outgoing links that a “news” sites has, the more likely it is to also have a higher number of incoming links: How good is the mainstrem media at linking out?