How to use links in a blog

1. All About Links
(and how to use them)
Attract Readers; Gain Impact

2. What are links?
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Links are like doorways, or portals, from one
website to another. They allow both human readers
and robot spiders to visit another webpage.
They can be internal
leading to other pages
in your blog or website
Or external, both for
incoming visitors and
outgoing examples

3. Where are links found?
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Inside your blog:
• navigation
• headlines
or blog titles
• within content
• as categories
and tags

4. Where are links found?
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Inside your blog:
• social sharing
buttons
• call to action
buttons
• sidebar listings

5. Where are links found?
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Outside your blog:
• your publicised URL
• social networking
updates
• other blogs
• your social media
profiles

6. How to use links in blogging
Attract Readers; Gain Impact

7. What makes a good link?
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Relevance: A link should always be relevant to its
destination. The subject should match on both
sides. Lack of relevance creates disapproval from
the search engines.
Contextual: You can use relevant
words in your blog post to become a
‘contextual’ link. These words should
contain the same keyword for the
subject matter in the destination post
or webpage, which is made into a link.
This link
wellington boots
should go to a
page about
wellington boots.

8. Why you should create links
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Linking out of your blog:
• providing value to your readers by linking to quality content;
• building relationships by sending other bloggers traffic and making a
good impression;
• build credibility by showing you read widely and willing to share this
information with your readers;
• avoid using too many links, or the search engines will think you are
spamming;
• place your links ‘above the fold’ or as close as possible to the top of
your post for the best impact.

9. Why you should create links
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Linking into your blog:
• share other relevant posts you’ve written within the same subject
to your readers;
• this encourages your readers to venture further into your blog to
read more;
• and adds to your search engine optimisation impact of your post.
• TIP: Use the ‘Yet Another
Related Posts Plugin’ to
automatically generate
related links back to old
posts you have written.

10. Automatically generated links
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Blogs automatically create links all the time. Here are some
examples:
• New pages will automatically be placed within the navigation
• Whenever you write a new post headline, it automatically
generates a permalink (the post’s individual page’s URL)
• Allocating your post to a category
and filling in keyword tags appear
as links on your post
• A newly published post’s link appears in the sidebar listing

11. Sidebar links
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Sidebars are populated by widgets, which can contain
information that can be links.
• Links to your social media profiles
• Links to social networking activity
• Icon links
• Subscription links

12. Biographies with links
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
Your can set up a biography under each post with the ‘Fancier
Author Box plugin’.
This places your biography under each of your posts, and also
in any other blog you write for.

13. Biographies with links
Attract Readers; Gain Impact
You will need to update your User Profile with the URLs of
your social media profiles and the contents of your bio.

14. How to create links
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(This starts off simply, and gets progressively
harder, so you choose how far you want to go).

15. How to create a link
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in content within a blog post or page:
Highlight the words you want to become a link
Click on the link icon

16. How to create a link
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in content within a blog post or page:
Fill in the destination page URL in the 1st field, and a
description in the 2nd field
Don’t forget to
click on the
Add Link
button

17. How to create a link
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in content within a blog post or page:
The words you
highlighted have
now become a link
Click on the preview
button to see your link
activated in your post

18. Alt links
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Pictures need to have alt links behind them so
the search engines can find and index them.
Click on the
pencil icon.Click on the
picture in your
post to bring up
the editing icons.

19. Alt links
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Pictures need to have alt links behind them so
the search engines can find and index them.
Write a description of
the picture in the
Alternative Text field
Don’t forget to
click the Add Link
button.

20. Coded links
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It’s good for you to know what a link in code looks like, and how
it works. Here is a simple link:
<a href=“http://fairyblogmother.co.uk”>Fairy Blog Mother</a>
Now before you get too frightened, I’ve colour coded it for you.
The brackets < > keep the code tidy and in one place.
The a href= and /a are the bits that says it’s a link. The slash in
front of the /a says ‘stop’, thus ending the link.
The speech quotations in green “ “ determine when the URL
starts and begins.
The URL is in full in between the speech quotations.
The Fairy Blog Mother is what will show up as the linked phrase.

21. No-follow links
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Remember I said links allow traffic from one blog to another,
both by humans (readers) and robots (search engines). But
sometimes the search engine access needs to be restricted.
You may not want Google to access links for sponsored posts,
sites where you don’t trust or endorse the content and you want
to prevent passing on unworthy page ranking.
All written links are naturally do-follow, so to make them no-
follow, you need to add this bit in red to the link’s code:
<a href=“http://mysite.com” rel=“nofollow”>My Site</a>
WordPress adds no-follow to its comments by default to help
reduce spam, but you can install plugins to make your comment
links do-follow if you want.

22. More fancy coded links
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There are more bits of code you might like to know which help to
‘optimise’ your links to make them work better.
To make your link open in a new browser page, add this to the code:
<a href=“http://mysite.com” target=“_blank”>My Site</a>
To create that little yellow title tag that pops up when you mouse
over a link, add this to the code:
<a href=“http://mysite.com” title=“tag’s contents”>My Site</a>
If you want to add an alt tag to your link (suitable for when it is
associated with an image), you add this to the code:
<a href=“SiteURL” ><img alt=“image description” src=“ImageURL” />
</a>