Thanks for your comment. Attempting to get natural links is not an easy task and there are only certain niches that are able to acquire them. If you have a site about selling shoes there are going to be less people willing to link to you. This is why you must have a blog and use it to write outside the box. Good luck.

Thats great, links are always welcome:)

With regards to the outbound links I suggest reading “google ranking factors” and “outbound link theory“.

You can also check out opinions on outbound links at SEOmoz Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages ,, you will have to scroll down to get to it.

Anchored outbound keywords simply suggest that those keywords are more important to your content, the same is said of bold keywords.

Don’t be scared of linking out, a site that links out is healthy, however don’t over do it on one page, I have a outbound link maximum of 30 links. Nofollowing links stopped that page from passing on PageRank and therefore you retained it to pass around your other pages, now nofollow means that PageRank simply evaporates and you are unable to retain the PageRank for your own site. Remember the PageRank of a page is judged by it’s inbound links and not effected by the outbound links on it. Outbound links only effect the amount of PageRank a page can pass, if that makes sense. So if my home page had 200 PageRank points that would only change if the links pointing to the page changed, however if a page had 10 outbound links it could only pass on 20 PageRank points to each, the more links you have on a page the less PR flows through each one.

Don’t be paranoid about outbound links, this is how the web was designed to work in the first place.

You say that “It has now been proven that using your targeted keywords in outbound links will increase your ranking ability.” How does this work?

My natural intuitive inclination would be to put links in where they help my readers.

However, I have read about link juice and Matt Cutts’ recent statement about nofollow and I am confused about whether it is in my interest to put a link to another site in my articles, even to sites that would be a good additional resource for my readers.

I would be happy to put an outbound link in an article if it did me no harm in terms of ranking (a link for example to a museum site that has an illustration of something I am writing about). I would not want my rank to be adversely affected though simply by having these links.

How does it work?

Also, I understand that people notice bold text more because it says look at me. Do the search engines also ‘notice’ bold text more?

It does take a lot more time but I like to include graphics here and there as the post’s seem to get more attention. I know people who spend literally weeks putting posts together but I guess you get out what you put in, in the long run. I like to put a few hours a side every week to brainstorm post ideas, writing simply fits in when it can.