Lightenings Blogworld

Linking

I remember back when I first started blogging. I thought I was an absolute LEGEND just to be able to write and post what I wanted to say. To actually LINK to someone else’s blog or a website or anything like that was to me like climbing Mount Everest. Seemingly impossible and rather overwhelming.

For those who are rather net-savvy or have been blogging for a while, it’s easy to forget just how hard all those little things are to learn. But take heart, you CAN learn how to do them and once you have done it a few times, you’ll find it does get easier and easier.

Why Is It Important to Know How to Link?

Links in the internet world are as important as roads are in our physical world. They help people to find their way around the internet.

The most important reason to link is to make life easier for your readers. Don’t assume that they know their way around your suburb of the blogworld just because they read your blog. If you mention something you’ve seen somewhere on the internet, it’s nice to provide your readers with a link so that they can have a look too.

To me it’s also good etiquette. Not providing a link is kind of like taking a friend to a party and failing to introduce them to anyone.

There are several other good reasons for providing a link to a page you’re talking about. Search Engines use links to determine how important a particular website is deemed. The more links you have going out from your blog and coming in to your blog (by others linking to you), the more likely you are to be noticed by search engines. This is something that is still a little bit beyond me but Meg wrote a great explanation of Spiders and Linking not that long ago that’s well worth a read if you’d like to know more.

Basically, the more links coming in to a site, the more major road that site needs. Search Engines recognise that website provides a major road or Highway and so they’ll send traffic in that direction.

There is also another great reason to link to other blogs. Many blog owners will keep an eye on who is linking to their site. It’s kind of like waving a flag that says, “I’m talking about you, wanna come and see?” I’ll talk more about that and technorati in my next post (next Monday).

How Do You Insert a Link Into Your Blogpost?

The easiest way I have found to do this is to:

1. Type the text you want to appear as a link.

Some people will simply type or copy and paste the URL of the page they want to link to into their post. For example http://www.lighteningonline.com . That works but it looks rather messy.

What if you want your link to look like this? Lightening

So you type in the word Lightening

2. Highlight the text you’ve just typed.

3. You should find a little icon that looks like a chain on the screen you’re using (if you’re using the “visual” screen to type into. If you click on it, it will give you a little screen where you can either type the URL of the website you are linking to OR simply copy and paste it from your own browser screen. (I’m sure there’s a fancy way to explain what a URL is but basically it’s the location of the page you want people to be able to find via your link).

Snoskred’s Writing a Post has a more detailed explanation (with screen shots) of adding links to a post. It’s part of her “Wordpress Training Wheels” series but linking isn’t all that much different if you’re using blogger (unless you’re used to linking the “hard way” like I used to do in blogger).

HELP! I Made a Link and Now My Whole Paragraph is Showing as a Link

I’m hoping I’m not the only one to have ever encountered this problem. I’ll mention it here on the off chance that I’m not. Sometimes when you link as you go, the text following a link will be considered as part of the text FOR the link. So it’ll be underlined and change colour to look like the rest of the link. It’s the sort of thing that can drive a novice crazy!!!

To fix this, simply highlight the text that isn’t supposed to be part of the link and then click on the broken chain you see next to the link chain. That’s basically an “unlink” icon.

Not All Links Are Created Equally

When it comes to providing a link that will benefit a site in terms of search engine traffic, it helps to consider what text you use when linking. It’s common when linking to a blog to create a clickable link to either the blog author’s name OR the name of the blog. Sometimes this is the most appropriate way to link to a blogger.

BUT, if you are referring to something in particular that the blog author was talking about, there are words that can be used as a link which will be of more benefit to search engines than their name. If I’m referring to a particular post, I will sometimes use the post title as the link as most post titles give some kind of indication as to the content of the post.

In the example above, I could have linked to Meg or to Dipping into the Blogpond but neither of these give the search engines any clue as to what Meg is talking about that I’m linking to. You know, because you have the surrounding text to explain to you what I’m linking to. I could have used the title of her post “Linking, Spiders and Comment Love” which would have given a much better indication to the search engines of what she is talking about in the linked post. In this particular instance, I chose to use the words Spiders and Linking as it fitted better into the sentence I was using.

Now I’m hoping that search engines don’t get grumpy about me linking 5 times to the same post in one post (if they do Meg, you’d better tell me and I’ll change some of these links).

Like I said, I’m certainly no expert in this area. I’m just trying to give you a bit of basic information which might be helpful.

If you’d like to delve further into an understanding of how linking works, Meg linked in her post to an article by Andy Beard called Linking Mistakes. I find Andy Beard’s posts a little more complex and not always easy to understand. However there are a few suggestions on what not to do when linking to other blogs that you might find helpful.

If you have any questions or find something isn’t clear, feel free to ask. Then we can all learn together.

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