how to use links in a blog

All About Links(and how to use them)

Attract Readers; Gain Impact

What are links?


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 pagesin your blog or website

Or external, both for incoming visitors and outgoing examples

Where are links found?


Inside your blog:

• navigation

• headlinesor blog titles

• within content

• as categoriesand tags



Inside your blog:

• social sharingbuttons

• call to actionbuttons

• sidebar listings



Outside your blog:

• your publicised URL

• social networkingupdates

• other blogs

• your social mediaprofiles

How to use links in blogging


What makes a good link?


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.

Why you should create links


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.

Why you should create links


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.

Automatically generated links


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

Sidebar links


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

Biographies with links


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.

Biographies with links


You will need to update your User Profile with the URLs of your social media profiles and the contents of your bio.

How to create links


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

How to create a link


in content within a blog post or page:

Highlight the words you want to become a link

Click on the link icon




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




The words you highlighted have now become a link

Click on the preview button to see your link activated in your post

Alt links


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.

Alt links


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.

Coded links


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.

No-follow links


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.

More fancy coded links


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>

how to use links in a blog

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