The very quick answer to this question is yes.
With site owners scared of giving link equity away, external linking is (wrongly!) becoming somewhat of a dying breed nowadays, but each and every company will have its own protocol.
Providing the direction you’re sending people is reliable, useful and relevant, pointing your visitors to someone else’s site can in fact add value to your status. Put yourself in their shoes:
You’re on a business’ website. You’re reading something really interesting. Within the article, they suggest some further reading which provides even more rich content. You finish your research feeling well and truly fulfilled. You’d feel pretty appreciative for the nudge in the right direction, right?
Don’t detriment yourself
If you’re one of the fearless few who aren’t afraid of adding the odd external link here and there, to retain your visitors, it’s definitely a wise idea to set it to open in a new tab.
Why? Because if you link to a piece of great content (sadly one you've not written this time) and don’t, you run the risk of the user becoming so consumed with the content you directed them to that they forget about you altogether.
In this scenario, sadly, as with anything in life, there’s no guarantee they’ll hit the back button to return your site, and if you’ve been misplaced from their mind they might continue browsing elsewhere.
On the flip side, if you do set the link to open in a new tab, the user will be prompted to return to your site because you’ll remain visible in their brower’s tabs. Win, win, right?
How to set a link to open in a new tab
This’ll depend entirely on the content management system (CMS) you’re working with. I’m with Wix and, fortunately, it’s as simple as ticking a box that says open in ‘New window’. Different CMS’ will likely vary - especially if you’re using your own, custom-built platform, but the likes of Wordpress and Squarespace should be pretty similar.
Manual intervention
If there’s no obvious and easy solution in your CMS, all hope’s not lost; there is a manual workaround.
Nip into the source code of whatever page you’re on and find the link you want to meddle with. It should look like this:
<a href=”https://keyholecontent.com/”>Keyhole Content</a>
By default (and from experience), most CMS’ don't set links up to open in a new tab. To override this, all you need to do is add a small section of code to the link, like this:
<a href=”https://keyholecontent.com/” target=”_blank”>Keyhole Content</a>
It’s worth noting, the space following the URL and additional code preceding your anchor text must be present and in this order. If it isn’t, it won’t work.
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