Give Good Links

One of the best ways to build traffic on your blog, besides writing great content, is to be noticed by other bloggers. And one of the best ways to be noticed by other bloggers, besides leaving comments on their sites and sending them adoring letters is to link to them.

But linking to other blogs is important for other reasons as well, especially this. It helps you get noticed by search engines. Search engines sit up and take notice when a site links to you, but they also notice when you link to someone else, even though they give that kind of link less importance. After all, links are what the world wide web is made of.

Search engines pay even more attention to good links, because they glean keywords from those links. Keywords are another important factor in ranking well in a search result, because the more your targeted keyword appears in your site, the higher the likelihood, the search engine believes, that your site is actually about that subject.

So how do you build a good link, one that will help both you and the site you are linking to? It’s a two step process.

First, you need to make sure that the URL for your post (or the web address that appears when you click on the title of the published post) has your keywords in it. This happens automatically in Blogger, here’s an example:

http://www.andnowwearefive.com/2008/09/first-day-of-school.html

It’s fairly easy to set in self hosted Wordpress blogs. Go to your website’s dashboard, then ‘Settings’, then ‘Permalinks’, then choose the option for month and name or day and name, your choice.

The second important way of building a good link is to carefully choose the text for the link itself. So instead of merely saying ‘click here to see my kids’ first day of school’, you want to use targeted keywords in the link. For example:

Almost Frugal has step by step instructions for how to make a frugal laptop sleeve.

Notice how the link is threaded with keywords? Now you might be saying, ‘But how do I know what keywords that site is targeting?’ The answer is ‘You don’t.’ But, you can probably make an educated guess. If you look at the title of the above article I’ve linked to, there are a lot of the same words being used.

http://almostfrugal.com/2008/09/12/frugal-ikea-hacks-make-your-own-laptop-case/

I didn’t use the words ‘Ikea’, ‘hacks’ or ‘case’ although I did substitute the word ’sleeve’. But that’s ok, because you might assume that the other blogger (in this case, also me) might be targeting case and sleeve equally. Or, if for some reason you can’t guess the keywords from the post title, then you can probably guess them from the content. In any case, almost anything is better than ‘click here’.

Building links wisely is one of those things that will make the web a better place. It costs you very little in time or energy to do, but can benefit your linkee immensely. So go on, give good links today!