Many people who start separate blogs to help increase the traffic and search engine rankings of their main site often have questions about linking to their main site.  These questions range from how often to “link out” and whether they should have site-wide links as opposed to links in their content.

I want to tackle the question of how often a person should create links to their main site from within their blog.  For the remainder of this article, when I refer to linking to your main site, I mean linking to your main site’s home page specifically.

First, if you have created a site-wide link to your main site either from a navigation bar or in the sidebar of your blog, then you will automatically be creating an outbound link to your main site with each and every blog post or page you create.  My experience has shown that site-wide links appear to help your rank in MSN, and somewhat in Yahoo, but little in Google.  If you’re looking to boost your rankings in Google, then I would probably avoid setting up a site-wide link to your main site and instead focus on content links.

So now that we’ve somewhat settled on just using links in the content, how often should you (or can you!) link to your main site from it?  I am of the school of thought that says less is more.

You could link to your site several times in every post, but what good would that do?  Every visitor to your blog should be able to figure out pretty quick which business your blog represents, so why not do yourself and your visitors a favor and only link to your main site when it is relevant and helpful?

I have seen more than my fair share of business bloggers that feel the need to link out to their main site in each and every 2 paragraph post that they publish.  This is excessive, and I have yet to see a blog that does this become successful.

It is much, much better to only link out to your site when the content dictates to do so.  If your business has just launched a new service then by all means link out to the relevant page on your main site when you announce it on your blog.  But if you are just publishing general information about your business is there really a purpose in plopping in a link to your site other than self-serving interests?  If you blog with your reader’s interests in mind, then the SEO benefits will follow.

I have found that a beneficial linking rate to your site is around 15%.  That means you should link out to your main site in about 15% of your posts.  If you publish 1 post a day for your business blog then that means once a week your posts will include a link to your main site.  If you post every 2-3 days, then only 1 or 2 posts a month should contain a link to your main site.

Vary your anchor text with these links and eventually your main site will feel the effects from proper linking.  You will have more traffic to your main site and the PR juice transferred from your blog should be much higher than if you linked to your blog way too frequently.