External Links: Make Your Visitors Stay On Your Blogger

It is great to post links to your sources of information. It is great to post links to bloggers who have been writing for a long time and have success and good reputation. Successful bloggers monitor who is linking to them and will come to your site. Maybe even link to your blog. In fact successful bloggers are generous when it comes to link love. Links from successful blogs count a great deal.

On the other hand, you do not want your visitors to leave your blog when they follow an external link. Here's how you can have them go and stay at the same time: open the external link in a new window. Here's a quote from blogging4good.blogspot.com:

http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2009/01/do-not-let-visitors-leave-your-blog.html

Create a Hyperlink That Opens a New Window

The basic structure of a hyperlink looks like this:

<a href="http://internettradingbeginners.blogspot.com/">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

If you use this code, the clicking on the link will lead the visitor to the new location and they will leave your blog. Opening a new window on every click requires html code modification. Just add one more property to the ’a’ tag:

target="_blank"

Just like the href property/value pair (href="some value"), you need simply to include the target="_blank" to the ’a’ tag of your hyperlink. Here is what the finished hyperlink will look like:

<a href="http://internettradingbeginners.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

Some desktop software HTML authoring utilities are able to provide this functionality as an option for you when you create a hyperlink. For example, Post2Blog, I use can do that easily. But if you use online Blog editor, like Blogger, you do not have ready to go option for the hyperlinks properties modification. You need to review the HTML source, find the ’a’ tag you want to modify and then add the target="_blank" value pair to the hyperlink definition.

That's all folks. Happy external linking.