Now that we are a little back back on track in the issue of giving and receiving links, I think it is the responsibility of every blogger to provide the necessary juice to the links that they want. It is the norm for many bloggers to link another blogger with his name which defeats the whole purpose and greatly reduce the power of these valuable links. Unless you are a celebrity of sorts who makes a living with your name, then links should be what your blog is about and not who the author is. If I am Micheal Jackson and I have a blog, I, of course would love links with my name in it, but if I’m not, and I have a blog about WordPress Templates, then I would want my friends to link the blog with those words, not my name.
There are however, many blogs that have not yet started the practice of having their keywords as their blog’s title. Many has a misconception that their post title is already relevant, which in my opinion is not so. The title of a blog are the words you see in your browser’s title bar when you open your homepage. When I want to link a blog, that is the place I will look if the author has not specified or drop hints on any preferred keywords that he would liked to be linked with. Now if the author for some reason or another wants a cool title rather than a title that attracts Search Traffic, then I think it’s the fault of the blogger rather than his readers for not getting any optimized links.
Rhys, my new found blog buddy has a blog titled very stylishly as BizBlog, which makes it quite irrelevant should I link his blog with such a word, but since he has hinted to me that he would like to optimize the words, Monetize Your Site, that will exactly what I will be using when I link to Rhys’s site. Now if he has titled his blog “How To Monetize Your Site” or anything similar, although not as stylish as BizBlog would it not have made my job of linking him easier? If I had not gotten to know Rhys and had just stumbled upon his blog, I would probably have linked Rhy’s blog like this.
“BizBlog (link) wrote an interesting post about What Everybody Should Know WordPress backup in his blog today”
Instead of,
“Rhys, of How To Monetize Your Blog, wrote an interesting post about What Everyone Ought To Know About WordPress Backup in his blog today.
Now I would like to thnk the second method of linking will carry more juice.
Hey Costa!
That is one evilly powerful link-back you put in this article. Post title, nick, keywords and all, I thank you my friend for getting into the spirit of this in such a big way.
We reap what we sow in this crazy old world of ours, and when we take the trouble to extend some link karma to other bloggers we will surely pick up a few nice links in reply. This is also why I have set up my blog with CommentLuv.
You are so right, the second method does indeed carry more juice: You are The Man………….
Hi Rhys,
No problemo, man. I hope this practice can really take of and we can see the good old days of blogging when no one has to think twice before linking to some blogs they like.
Great link juice article, Costa. I need to follow it up with my own. I already wrote about it once, I think, but the other bloggers aren’t paying attention. I even use the KeywordLuv plugin and it plainly says how to do it.
Hi RT,
Hmm… the Keywordluv plugin and the Commentluv plugin, think I’ll have to take a look at booth of these. Might be quite handy.
Do you see the post on Problogger about comment names-I can’t believe how many looked at commenters with keywords as spam.
Yes James,
Personally I have no problems with friends using their keywords or post URLs in my comments. But some really go overboard with it and in cases like these I will either delete the whole comment or leave the comment intact but remove the unwanted links.
I don’t allow keywords, especially if the comment is completely off topic. I even had one commenter construct a signature, complete with tagline and link. All of this was longer than his 3 word comment: .
Hi Shirley,
Yup, those are really scumbags out for links and nothing else. I doubt they even read what we write before inserting whatever they want and leave. I delete all these as soon as it catches my eyes.
@Leo Dimilo,
Indeed Leo, I think it’s perfectly okay when you use your keyword in the Name field when you comment. In fact, I encourage this practise. It’s those “hunters” that gets to me. What with a comment like,
“nice post!” followed by all his links. That’s totally unacceptable to me.
Hey Costa!
Long time no see……..
I have to tell you I was trawling thru my stats this am and noticed that your post above is still kicking thru links to my site.
It definitely proves your point that keyword rich links are better and more effective.
Caio
Just been browsing your site looking for inspiration. Think I’ve found some now! Thanks for all the info.