Outbound Linking - Dont Lose Your Customers

Providing links to external sources to either provide further information to your visitors or perhaps to substantiate a claim or testimonial is a great idea - but by remembering this simple guideline, you won't give your traffic and perhaps customers away.

People have a tendency to flit around the web - following links here, there and everywhere. Keeping a potential subscriber or customer's attention is no mean feat.

When you link to an external site, be sure that you set the outbound link to open a new window (target="_blank"). This way, there's a greater chance that you won't lose the person from your site totally. A browser window/tab with your page will still be there once they are done reading whatever on the other sites you link to.

This mightn't sound too important, but it really is. Sure, the visitor can backtrack (sometimes), go through their history (if they remember the name of your site) or open a new tab themselves by right mouse button clicking on links - but why make things difficult for the person to do so? At times, the person simply won't be able to get back to your site. Here's an example:

• I visit a merchant's site and there's testimonials from other site owners. I follow a link that doesn't open in a new window.  
• The testimonial owner's site is on a topic I'm interested in and I become engrossed in that content. On one of the pages there's a link to another site that I follow... and so on and so on. 
• By this time I've pretty much forgotten the original site I was on and there's no visual cue to trigger my memory; i.e. a window open with the original site displaying. Even if I do remember that I want to get back to the original site, if I've closed the tab I can't return to it easily.

This  isn't just a possibility, it happens to me and others I've spoken to about it regularly.

Sometimes making the most of your traffic isn't down to complex theories, heavy duty psychology or eye-popping features; it can be the simple things such as how you link to external sites that make a positive difference.