A very core element of blogging is the networked nature of a blog. Bloggers work together and each person’s platform is positively influenced by building relationships with fellow blogs.
After grasping the basics of what is a blog, you need to utilize some of the more intermediate features of a blogging to bring in more traffic and ultimately increase the value of your blog. The single most effective way to enhance your blog is to use hyperlinks.
The first way to link your blog is to add some internal links. These are links within one of your posts that point to another one of your posts. This keeps traffic on your site, allowing people to click around easily from article to article. The more time a visitor spends on your site, the better.
Also consider that many visitors on your site are browsing it for the first time ever, so you want to help guide them through your articles. Any time you begin touching on something you have previously discussed in a blog post, make it a link.
This also helps with search engine optimization (<–Look, an internal link!). Search engine spiders actually crawl your webpages and follow links. So, website spiders hop to additional articles on your website they might not have discovered otherwise.
The second method of linking your blog involves external links. These links point to other websites, and improve your visitor’s experience by showing them other useful resources. Think of this as citing your sources.
Linking directly to other blog posts often times helps your own search engine optimization and helps to yield more traffic. That’s because of a blogging feature called trackbacks, which is an automated way to get more links to your website.
Basically, any time you provide a link to someone else’s blog post, you get a link on their site pointing back to you. So, it helps to link externally.
Because of this, blogs feed off one another. For example, TechCrunch recently posted an anti-voicemail article (<–Look, an external link!). Other popular blogs such as WebWorkerDaily wrote a similar post simply commenting on the original article. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Spend just as much time reading other blogs as writing your own. And when you write your own blog posts, include some hyperlinks and watch your results improve exponentially.
Tags: webworkerdaily, techcrunch, hyperlinks, search engine optimization
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July 9th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Nice article. Thanks for sharing.