How to Add Outbound Links to WordPress [Tips and Tricks for Success]
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There’s a lot of advice out there about internal linking, but you might be surprised to know that adding outbound links to your content is just as important—for both user experience and SEO! Outbound links are links that lead from content on your site to content on another domain. In this article, we’re going to teach you how to add outbound links to WordPress, including some best practices for link placement, anchor text, and the difference between follow and no-follow links.
How to Add Outbound Links In WordPress
The good news is, adding outbound links in WordPress is easy.
Here’s how you do it.
- Log into WordPress, and open the post or page you want to add the link to.
- Once you’re in the content editor, find the word you want to link and highlight it.
- Click on the “insert link/edit link” button in the editor. The icon normally looks like a chain link.
- In the URL field, paste in the URL of the page you want to link to.
- If required, you can use the “link options” button to change your link settings. For example, you can click “Open Link in a New Tab” if you want to link to open in a new page when the user clicks it.
- Click “Apply” or “Add link” (or the blue ‘enter’ icon) to save the changes and create your outbound link.
- Hit “Publish” or “Update” to save the changes and make the link live on your site.
That’s all there is to it! Now that you know how to create outbound links in WordPress, you can add them whenever you want to cite a source of information or when you want to direct your readers to additional information on the topic you are writing about.
If you have a large number of already published blog posts that need outbound links adding to them, you can use LinkWhisper to see which posts and pages have outbound external links and which don’t have any.
Head to the LinkWhisper links report. Here you will see a column on the right showing the number of outbound external links for each post. This saves you from going into each post and checking manually—a huge time saver!
Why Are Outbound Links Important?
Although you don’t always want to be directing your readers away from your site, there are a few good reasons you should be adding outbound links to your content.
SEO
Outbound links are a powerful on-page SEO factor. Adding outbound links in WordPress can have a positive effect on your site’s SEO by preventing dead-end pages, which helps search engine crawlers navigate and rank content on the web.
You are also signaling to search engines that the site you are linking to is trustworthy, which is good for SEO in general.
Consistently linking to other sites could also result in other sites linking back to you, giving you more backlinks to your site.
User Experience
If you don’t want to go in-depth on a certain subject, you can provide your users with any additional information they might need by linking to additional sources. This can improve the user’s experience on your site and help to provide context—particularly for more complicated topics.
Providing users with a good experience can help to decrease your bounce rate and improve engagement metrics—both of which are positive signals for SEO.
Build Trust by Backing up Statistics, Factual Data, and quotes with Sources
If you include facts and statistics in your content that you did not come up with yourself, you should link to the original source of the data.
This backs up what you are saying and helps build trust with your readers, showing them that you have used credible sources for your information.
Tips for Creating Outbound Links
Here are a few tips and best practices for creating outbound links in WordPress.
Anchor Text
The anchor text you use should be descriptive and give users an idea of where the link leads to. This is beneficial to search engines too, giving the link context within the article.
Avoid using vague phrases like “click here” or “read more.”
Relevance
Any links you include in your content should be relevant to the topic and helpful to the user. Don’t add in links just for the sake of it.
Follow vs NoFollow
Follow and no-follow links are types of HTML attributes that tell search engines whether or not to follow a link and pass link equity (link juice) onto the other page.
If you are linking to a reputable source, then you can use the follow attribute. When a search engine crawler finds a follow link, it will crawl and index the page and count the link as a vote of confidence or endorsement for the content it links to.
Do-follow is normally the default, so in most cases, you can just add your external link as normal.
If you are linking to a source that you do not trust, or do not want to pass link equity to, then you should use the no-follow attribute.
No followed links should also be used for:
- Advertising campaigns
- Sponsored content
- Affiliate links
- User-generated content, such as comments on a blog post
You can change a link to nofollow by clicking on the link settings icon and checking the box that says “nofollow,” which will let search engines know that they should ignore the link.
Page Authority and Spam Score
Make sure that any pages you link to are trustworthy, with reliable information. You can check the authority and spam of a page for free using MOZ.
If a page has a high spam score, you should NOT link to it, as this could have a detrimental effect on your site’s SEO.
Always Open Links in a New Tab
When you add outbound links in WordPress, you will see a checkbox that you can tick if you want the link to open in a new tab. It’s always worth doing this, as it means users won’t be directly navigating away from your page.
Conclusion
Adding outbound links to your content can provide valuable resources for your audience, improve your site’s credibility, and boost your SEO rankings, so it’s definitely worth taking the time to get it right.
Now that you know how to add outbound links to WordPress, it’s time to make sure you have at least one outbound link on every page or post on your site. You can check how many outbound links you have on each page easily using LinkWhisper.