External linking best practices

 External linking best practices

External linking best practices

Aside from good search engine rankings and social bookmarking, another big source of traffic to your blog will be from your link exchanges with other blogs on the same (or similar) topic as yours. While the search engines might discount these reciprocal links as a way of manipulating search engine rankings, exchanging links with other blogs will result in a steady stream of visitors, and ultimately regular readers.

There are two ways of linking to other blogs:

1) Leaving comments on relevant posts

If you find blog posts which are highly relevant to the theme of your blog, you can leave comments on these posts with a link back to your blog. You will not be able to include any keywords in your link because by default WordPress uses the name you use for your reply as the link back to your blog, so it makes sense to use a name which you can brand. This could be the name of your blog, or better yet, just your name. Don’t waste the opportunity by using a nickname; use a name that over time will be associated with your blog.

To get the most out of this method you need to leave replies on a daily basis on as many blogs as you can find related to yours. Think laterally, if your blog theme is dog training you need to find blogs on any dog related theme to leave comments. For example, dog health, puppy care, dog accessories, dog training aids etc.

When you leave a reply to a post on another blog, make sure your reply is directly related to the blog post. Don’t try leaving an advertisement for your blog; just add your comments to the post. Become a regular reader of the blog and leave replies as often as you can and you will slowly build up brand awareness for your blog.

Alternatively you can use any exceptional posts you find as the basis for content for a post on your own blog. You do this by writing a short comment about the post you found and creating a link to the post on the other blog. As long as the other WordPress blog has trackbacks and pingbacks enabled, a link to your blog and a brief summary of your post will be included in the comments on the other blog post. There are no special instructions to follow; the latest version of WordPress will automatically send a ping to the WordPress blog you link to.

If you don’t include a direct link to a post on another blogging system in your article, you should enter the trackback URL (for the post you are referring to) into the “Send trackbacks to:” text box. This can be found in the “Trackback” drop down box positioned near the bottom of the page when you write a post.

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To notify other blogs that you have linked to them and to enable readers to use this feature for your own posts, all you have to do is make sure the “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings” checkboxes are both checked in the “Discussion” drop down option. This is located near the top and on the right side of the page when you write a post.

Make sure you have both the following options checked in the “Options / Discussion” page of your WordPress control panel:

- Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article.

- Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)

2) Using the WordPress Blogroll

Blogs you add to your blogroll will be displayed in the sidebar of your blog. Before adding a blog to your blogroll make sure you have established some kind of relationship with the owner of the blog you want to add. To build this relationship with other bloggers you need to have written a number of posts which they have commented on, and you must have commented on a number of posts on their blogs.

There’s little point adding a blog to your blogroll if the owner is not willing to add your blog to theirs, all you will succeed in doing is bleeding away some of your blog’s authority to the blog you link to, with little or no return value.

On the other side of the coin, don’t be scared to refuse another blogger’s request to be added to your blogroll. Only add blogs which will complement yours in terms of relevance, quality and potential traffic. Don’t refuse a blog because it doesn’t have a high Google PR, if a blog has good information that may be of use to your readers, add it as long as you are certain you will get readers from the other blog (and vice versa