External Links

External links are links from your website to another website.

WordPress Master includes a plugin called Link Tile, a box which displays selected external links within category tiles in your sidebar. (If you have subdomains you can also use the link tile to display links out from the main domain to the subdomains or vice versa.)

If your site doesn't have subdomains, then your main use of the Link Tile plugin will be to display outgoing links to a selected number of external sites.

First of all though – you need to decide what outgoing links you want to put on your site, and which you choose to display in the Link Tile.

As you build your website (and particularly as you monetize), you'll probably add more external links to from your site. Many of these will be in the form of text links within the content of your posts and pages, or banner ads from affiliate programs.

The Link Tile is generally used for text links of a more permanent or static nature. Some of the types of outgoing links you may want to include:

• Links to joint venture partners if you have these set up yet
  
• Links to sites you recommend or consider important in your niche
  
• Links to your own affiliate program if you set one up at a later date
  
• Links to professional associations relevant to your site – for instance the relevant financial regulating body for a finance site, The Kennel Club for a dog site and so on.
  

You may have heard some negative comment about outgoing links and their effect on your Page Rank (“PR”), a ranking metric applied to web pages by Google. Many commentators and so-called SEO experts have made much of the fact that having too many external links will “bleed” your site’s PR.

Of course, no one apart from the top team at Google really know how PR works. But if you think about the logic of Google reducing the PR of sites that provide visitors with additional relevant resources, it probably doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

The key word here – as with everything Googlesque – is RELEVANCE. If you are a true Authority Site, then you will quite naturally want to offer your visitors the benefit of your knowledge and experience in your niche. That's bound to mean showing them where to get more information about the topic elsewhere. It doesn’t mean putting up a whole load of external links to sites outside your niche just because they link to you.

As always, consider it from your visitor’s perspective. If you land on an Authority Site in the dog training niche, do you expect that site to send you to a site about holidays in Australia or gardening? Probably not. On the other hand, if you get a selection of real relevant resources that add value to your visit – you’ll come back for more.

The other issue in outgoing links is balance. A huge directory page full of outgoing links of varying quality and relevance is not balanced - nor is it of much use to your visitor. How can the visitor sort the wheat from the chaff if you haven’t bothered to? And how can you be a true authority in your field if you provide low quality links?

TIP: Use external links to provide relevant resources. Take a look at a well researched, carefully constructed list of outgoing links all relevant to a short post on link-building:

http://www.copyblogger.com/increase-web-traffic/

The page is PR 6, so outgoing links of this quality probably haven’t done his PR any harm and - certainly will have increased his traffic.

Select outgoing links based on relevance and quality. Choose your links carefully - and that goes for all external links anywhere on your site - not just those that you showcase in the Link Tile.

The Link Tile is configured within the Link Manager in your WordPress Admin.

Under the Links tab on the main Admin bar there are four options:

1. Manage Links: Lists all your current links and allows you to edit or delete links individually and to use check boxes to move or change the visibility of a more than one link at a time
2. Add Link: Enables you to set up an individual link; add a short description which will show when the mouse hovers over the text link name; and assign the link to a link category.
3. Link Category: Allows you to create categories for your links so that the name you give the category will show above the link tile containing the links in your sidebar
4. Import Links: Enables you to import links from another website provided that the website allows export as an OPML file

Experiment with the settings to create the organization structure for external links that you want.

Go and take a look at how Jack Humphrey uses external linking on his WPM site, The Friday Traffic Report.