If you have begun working on search engine optimization efforts for your website, you already know that search providers evaluate the relevance of a site largely on the links that go into and out of a website.

The rank of sites that link to your page and the anchor text they use to link to you can make a big difference in how highly your site is ranked.

The anchor text related to the link that sends visitors to your site is very important to your search engine rankings, but the link relevance for outbound links can affect your site as well.

When you contact another site to place a reciprocal or contextual link to your site, do you know what they are really linking to?

The anchor text is the words or phrases that are attached to the link to your page. To get the most out of your linking efforts, the text that is attached to your link should be the keyword or key phrase for which you are hoping to obtain higher search engine rankings.

For example, if you are hoping to get a higher ranking for the search term “best skincare product”, you would hope for a link from that phrase on another site.

Simple, right?

The other issue that you should consider is the relevance of content on the site that is linked to you. Link relevance is often determined by the relevance of the information on a site.

So if you get a link from a site about barbecuing to your site that sells gas grills, search engine algorithms will see link relevance and give your site a higher ranking. However, if the link to your grilling site comes from a page that sells cosmetics, search engines will not count the link as highly and could penalize your site for this.

To obtain high marks for link relevance with search engines, you should try to get links from and post links to sites that are similar to yours.

The biggest way that outbound links can help or hinder your search engine optimization efforts is through the anchor text that you use on your site.

The link relevance for outbound links is evaluated by search engine providers based on whether the anchor text for a link is related to the content of the site it is linking to. For example, if you have a site about cars and you have an outbound link attached to the phrase “best European models” that leads to a site about gardening, search engines quickly view this as being potentially dishonest.

Another benefit to building relevant links to your page is that you are more likely to receive targeted traffic from those links.

Link relevance means that customers who click on the link to your page will get the information they were expecting, which can mean a much higher likelihood of sales from those links.

Get the most out of each link you post on your site or links to your pages from other sites by considering link relevance before you post.