Providing an outside link, or two, or three, or four, can help you drive more traffic to your blog. There are several reasons for this, which include: improved internet visibility through spider crawls from search engines, more networking opportunities, heightened credibility and reciprocal links to your blog, just to name a few.
One of the things search engines do when crawling through the internet to find new information is to look for links. Now I’m no IT expert, so I don’t know exactly how this works (please feel free to educate me if you know), but I do know that having outside links in your blog posts helps get them recognized; and in the highly competitive world of blogging, you need every advantage you can get. By the way, providing a link to another blog may help you in getting links back to yours, and those links help get you more blog traffic as well.
When looking for different blogs to link to, I suggest finding the most credible bloggers you can. Not only will this help give your readers the best information out there, it will raise your credibility as well. Your readers will be much more likely to return to your blog because they know you are a resource for them, even if it means directing them to another site. Providing a link to another blog also opens up networking opportunities that you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.
When I link to another blog, I am starting a relationship with somebody else in my field. Normally these bloggers will click over to my blog to check me out, and leave me a comment that provides me with much more insight into the subject I wrote about. Because the internet is so vast, it’s often difficult to build these important relationships otherwise. Keep in mind that you want to provide quality links to your readers; ones that relate to what you’re writing about and ones that truly give them something that can help them.
Getting more blog traffic is one of the main goals of any blogger on the internet. And, this is one of the best ways I have found to acheive that goal. What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree, disagree? Have you found better ways of getting more traffic to your blog? Leave me a comment, and let me know.