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Links: cash $$ of the blogosphere
Why links are valuable
Links are the currency of the internet. If you link to another website, you are telling your readers that you think this other website is interesting or valuable. You’re also giving your reader an easy way to verify the accuracy of that claim. It makes substantiation simple.
Bloggers love getting links from other websites…so much so that the phenomenon has its own terminology called “link love”.
Why the obsession with links?
Search engines evaluate websites on how many incoming links each website has. Everything else being equal, Google believes that a website with 100 incoming links is more important and valuable than a website with 50 incoming links and will rank its articles that much higher in its search results.
How to create a link in a blog post
Wordpress-the blogging platform Blogivists uses-makes creating a link within blog posts a snap! When you’re writing a post, do the following:
- Highlight a word or two that represents the link.
- Click on the “link” icon, which-appropriately-looks like a chain link.
- Then, enter the link’s complete URL in the pop-up box.
- Click “Insert”.
How to create a link in a comment
For the most part, the same simple process is not doable in comment boxes. In order to have words linked here, we’ll need to know a little html.
- Type “<a href=”.
- Immediately following the equal sign, enter the complete URL to which you would like to link, surrounded by quote marks.
- Enter “>” immediately following the URL surrounded by quotes.
- Type the words you want linked in the exact way you want them to appear. (The words you type here are known as the “anchor text”.)
- Then, type “</a>” after the anchor text.
- Finish up your comment and click on “Submit Comment”.
FYI
Lastly, keep in mind though that is not considered polite to add a link in a comment box unless you are positive it is relevant and helpful to the particular post. Otherwise, it is thought of as link-spamming.
So, now that you know, go out there and spread some love…link love, that is!
UPDATE: Video tutorial with the above processes follows:
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:49 pm
[...] They’re all great people so be sure to drop them a comment or two. Hey, maybe even some link love. [...]