Linking Strategies for Your Blog
We write blogs regularly and share wonderful information with others. One of the integral parts of a blog post are the links. These links give an added layer of depth of knowledge to your posts. What most people do not realize is that the links you insert into a post have either an internal or external destination. By internal or external destination, I mean that the link is either going to direct the reader off of my domain to another site or direct the reader to some other place inside my site.
When adding links into your blog post you need to be aware of what the affect will be when someone clicks on it. If the link is sending them off your site, you may want to make sure the link is opening in a new tab/window on the consumers browser. If the link is staying on your site, have the link open in the same window. Why? Well, if I write a post and share a quote from someone else and link to them, I am going to give a link to that person in my post. I don’t want to take my consumers completely away from my site because once they leave my URL and land at that other domain there is no telling where they would go. However, if the link opens in a new tab on the web browser, my site is still there for the consumer to return back quickly and easily. On the other hand if the link is to inside my domain, I want it opening in the same browser. We don’t want our clients having our site opening on 10 tabs.
Too often I see someone write a blog post and in the first line they have a link directing traffic off their site to some other domain. They do not specify to open in a new tab and within three seconds of me visiting your site I am gone for good. By changing the target you can accomplish a longer time the client stays on your site and also lower your bounce rate.
How To Set Links Targets
When you insert a link, into a post, you 
have the ability to set the target to either open the link in the same window or open link in a new window. So, next time you enter a link into your blog, make sure you set the target. While this doesn’t seem like much, it can increase the amount of time people are spending on your site. The more time spent on your site by consumers means the higher the probability of someone doing business with you.
Remember this simple and easy tip when you write your next blog post take a moment to think about your link target and set it to keep consumers with you as much as possible!
Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors
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I was just speaking to my assistants about the importance of links in blog posts and website pages. As you mentioned you need to keep the visitor on your site. We are creating some hyper local content for the Syracuse NY real estate market and it is important not to have links that direct the user off your site. Linking to worthy sites is also a great idea…
Thanks for sharing this information. I’ll use it on my blog posts.
Definitely very useful information, Jeremy. Hopefully more bloggers will actually use it (I hate going to a site and ending up with 5 open tabs for the same site).
Pretty basic but still need to know info.
You need to tell us about follow and do not follow links.
I agree. Great information. You actually got me thinking about my old blog posts and a part of me wants to make sure my future clients are staying on my site (But OMG-that’s a lot of work, especially if you have a lot of blogs like me).
The good news is that with all of the tracking tools, I know which blog entries get all of my traffic. Makes me want to re-optimize my entries that aren’t getting traffic.
Awesome post, here’s definitely value in creating content clusters (groupings of related content) and using deep linking strategies within your site to keep your customers glue to you.
Thanks for the info. New at blogging and link building. There are so many things to learn. Thanks for helping out the newbies!