When I get to the part of my SEO strategy that calls for adding links to high quality sites to an owners pages I almost always get, “I don’t want to link to a competitor.”

I also almost always throw up a little in my mouth.

First, not everyone in your market is a direct competitor. If you sell Mercedes and someone you want to link to sells Kias, sure you both sell cars, but are you seriously worried about some guy getting swayed from the new S-Class to the new Amanti.

Why do people think that their visitors forget how to use the Internet outside of their site? Potential customers and clients are going to visit your competition regardless. If you want to know how to make them choose your site for their transaction you need create the best content in your market, and read Rebecca’s post on landing page design over at SEOmoz.

Once you can get yourself, your boss, or client over the ridiculous fear of losing a customer via quality outbound links it becomes time to figure out how to choose these links, why to use them, and how to utilize them on the site.

Eric Enge recently wrote a great article on some of the reasons to use quality outbound links on your site at SEOmoz.

It all comes down to what you need to do to receive authoritative links. You have to get inside the head of the person who is going to make the decision about linking to you or not. If you don’t understand their mindset, your chances of success go down dramatically. Remember that these people are going to the sole judge and jury in terms of deciding whether or not to give you a link.

Eric correctly deduces that creating a high quality web page, that benefits visitors in your market, not only via content, but also through linked resources, is an amazingly effective type of link bait.

People love to link to fresh content and timely links.

There has been some research and experimentation on the lack of effectiveness, outbound linking can have in terms of search rankings. However, no matter whether you think an outbound link can help you rank for a specific term or not, I do not think the importance of the outbound link to the health of a site is easily argued.

The current state of search is heavily influenced by the interlinking web, if you are not participating in the interlinking web, by refusing to link out to sites, you cannot think that this action is going unnoticed by the search engines. If your site can be penalized for linking to the wrong kind of sites, you can obviously benefit from linking to the right type of sites, whether it be through the search algo or through the inbound links you will gain for having such a helpful resource.

Take a step back.

How else can outbound links help you?

They can actually benefit you in a completely contradictory way than you originally feared. By linking to high quality sites using the target=”new” to open the linked site in anew window, you can keep your visitor on your page and provide a customer experience that will build brand loyalty.

Choosing the sites you will link to is important. You will want to choose authority sites in the market, and will likely want to do a quick scan of sites for any spammy features. How will you know what is an authority in your market? Well if your asking that question you have more work to do than just outbound linking.

From the moment you being to optimize a site for search you should also be looking to become an authority, on some scale, in that market. Authorities communicate with other authorities. You will be able to use your established social graph to help further market your site as a resource in your vertical.

When utilizing the links on-site remember not to use more than 100 links per page, and try to remember that humans like yourself will be reading the page so focus on the content, and make it compelling.

If you are reading this post and drooling onto your keyboard, still trying to figure out why you should outbound link…

“I might lose customers!”

Try to think about your site through the eyes of a publisher you will later be asking for a link from. If you have no links why will they link to you.

Do unto others.

Give to receive.

Link karma.

Are you still drooling? If so please remove me from your feed reader.