There are many webmasters who solely focus on gaining as many links into their website as possible.  This approach is of course a good one to take whilst trying to boost your websites perceived importance, but it is important to spend some time linking to other websites.

An outbound link from your website can be considered as your vote for a particular website, which plays a huge part in the Search Engine’s ranking process. Basic Search Engine logic is if there are two websites that offer similar content, the site with more links pointing to it is considered to be more important or relevant.
Many webmasters tend to avoid doing this, as they only believe that they are assisting a potential rival website.  But by carefully linking to relevant websites, you can perform some search engine optimisation and increase your website’s relevancy.

An example of this would be a website for an amateur football team.  A typical website of this stature would more than likely consist of news, profiles and a contact page (with address) to try and gain a few new fans and possibly even sponsors. 
It’s unlikely that this website will be able to exchange links with the bigger football websites, but using outbound links can increase its relevancy.  A good step to take would be to link to around 10 major and established football websites (such as Sky Sports, BBC Football Coverage and Team Talk).
The next step would be to link to more like minded websites, of teams located in the same area.

When a search engine spider crawls the website, it will determine that the site is about football and a football team. The search engine spider would find the links page and discover some well-known links (such as the BBC Football) followed by fellow local football team websites.

The search engine spider will visit the more local websites and learn how these two websites are related to each other.
A key benefit of including outbound links this way is to ensure that your website is optimised for a Local search. A Local Search is important for any small business, it is strongly recommended that you always have your physical address listed on your website to benefit from local search enthusiasts.

The links to the major football websites will lead the spider to believe that the small football site is relevant to it. The search engine spider would then return the information to the database to be processed in the algorithm and has pre-sorted some search results based on the links your site points to.

By adding outbound links, your Google Page rank will more than likely increase, so always link to some relevant sites and the more established websites on your chosen topic.