Good Linking Policy

Do you have a linking policy? You should.

By “linking policy”, I mean how you decide what you’re going to link to when writing your blog post.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but including links in your post can benefit your blog in many ways. You might think the best way to keep your readers’ attention is to never link to anything. In practice, that’s simply not the case.

There are two kinds of links you need to consider when blogging. Internal and external. Internal links are to your own pages (other relevant articles on your own blog), and external articles are links to other people’s web sites. I’m going to look at the benefits of both separately:

Internal Links

As your blog grows, the chances are that most of your regular readers will be getting your blog via the RSS feed.

What that means is that there’s often little (if any) incentive for your readers to actually visit your web site. And if they never visit your web site, they may never click an ad or see other pages on your blog.

By including links to your own pages, you can draw attention to related articles on your own blog, all your readers – including RSS subscribers – can benefit from the related content, and you can benefit from all your readers visiting your web site – ads and all.

There is also an SEO benefit to be had from linking specific keywords to articles. For example, take the sentence:

Take a look at by AdSense beginners tips

You might be tempted to make the words ‘take a look’ into a link, but if you do this:

Take a look at my AdSense beginners tips

…search engines will start to associate they keywords ‘Adsense beginners tips’ with your article, and over time, you’ll get better search engine rankings when people search for those terms.

Now obviously, you shouldn’t over use internal links. Partly because they can be distracting, but also because search engines are pretty good at figuring out what you’re up to if you try to spam them. Use relevant links, and use them in moderation.

External Links

Linking to other people’s sites is something many bloggers try to avoid. Quite obviously, if a reader clicks a link to another site, they may never come back.

But as with internal links, a good, consistent use of external links can help your readers by giving them more information. And if you’re helpful and producing good quality content, then your readers will certainly return anyway.

If you’re quoting someone from their own blog or web site, you should always try to link to the relevant page on that person’s site. This is simply good manners, but there are a couple of other benefits you may not be aware of.

Firstly, bloggers are often the kind of people who like to know who’s talking about them. They’ll check sites like Technorati and Google Blog Search regularly to see if they’re being mentioned. By linking to relevant blogs, you may well find those bloggers becoming your own readers.

As an example of this, I mentioned Shoemoney in my recent article on Spelling and Grammar. I was intrigued that Shoe was also the first person to comment on the article in question. He may not be a regular reader, but it shows Money Blogger is “on the radar”.

The other benefit to linking is Trackbacks. Not all blogs use them, but many do. They provide links to other blog posts other people’s blog posts when they link to a specific posts, and are usually shown in the comments section of a blog post.

What this means is that you can write a reaction to someone else’s blog post on your own blog, and it will appear in the trackbacks/comments section of the original blog post. You get a link to your own post, simply by writing a reaction.

Not everyone uses trackbacks, because the system is open to abuse and can be difficult to manage. If you are taking advantage of other people’s trackback system, you should make sure you do so responsibly – and in context.

And that advice goes for all linking practice. Use useful, relevant links. Don’t be afraid to use external links where necessary, and don’t be tempted to try to spam search engines or other blogs with links to your own posts. All that will happen is that you’ll get banned from both.

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Tags: linking, links, tips, trackbacks