Tag Archives: hyperlink

STOP! Don’t Press Publish! Have You Remembered to Add The LINKS?

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35

Image of a linkAre you remembering to link to articles, websites or other blogger’s post when you write about them? Why NOT?

It’s really frustrating when you can’t check out more details in a post because the blogger’s failed to link. Readers won’t waste their time Googling to find the facts. Why BOTHER — it’s easier to change to another blogger.

Linking is a really important part of being a blogger and linking isn’t hard! Yet for some reason most new bloggers FAIL to link!

How To Create A LinkImage of copying link

  1. Copy the URL of the website you want to link to.
  2. In the post that you are writing highlight the text you want linked to the website and click on Insert/Edit Link button, paste the URL and then click INSERT.Image of linking

It’s good blogging etiquette to link to:

  1. A person’s blog if you mention a blogger
  2. The post if you are talking about a particular post on a blog

For example: Larry Ferlazzo is well known for sharing websites that will help you teach. Check out his Best Social Studies Websites — 2008

FINAL THOUGHTS

Most bloggers like to check out posts when people write about them and some will take the time to write comments on your posts. Linking to other bloggers is one way of increasing the conversation and readership of your blog.

What tips on blogging would you give new bloggers?

Image by tarotastic licensed under Creative Commons.

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What’s A Pingback? And How To Write Links

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Confused about what’s a pingback? It’s not surprising since the blogging term pingback often mystifies new bloggers.

Thankfully Marie reminded me of how baffling blogging terminology is when she commented “I’ve noticed some comments are entered via ‘pingback’. Can you explain what this is and how to use it?”.

What is a Pingback?

A pingback happens when another blogger writes a post and includes a link to your post in their post. When they publish their post you’ll normally receive an email notification letting you know they have referenced (i.e. linked to) your post. The email notification commonly includes an extract from the post they’ve written, a link to their post and a link to the post you had written.

Marie’s been nice enough to help me demonstrate a pingback by writing a post that links to one of my posts. Below is what the email notification of pingback from Marie’s post looks like.

Image of a pingback email explained

Clicking on the link to their post means you can:

  1. Check out what they’ve written
  2. Leave a comment on their post (if you choose)
  3. Decide whether you want to approve, delete or spam the pingback. Mostly you approve all pingbacks unless it obviously been written by a spam blog (these you delete or spam).

Once you’ve approved the pingback it’s displayed in the comments on your post with just the extract of post showing enclosed in brackets like these [...]. This is so other readers can follow the link and read the post on the other persons blog if they are interested.

Below is what Marie’s pingback looks like in the comments on my post.

Image of Pingback in comments

How To Link To Other Bloggers’ Posts

Reading blog posts that talks about other bloggers’ posts but doesn’t include links to them is really frustrating for readers. Why? Because readers like to follow the links and check out the information in more detail but without the links they can’t!

All you have to do is:

  1. Copy the URL of the post you want to link to.Copying a URL
  2. In the post that you are writing highlight the text you want linked to the post, click on Insert/Edit Link button, paste the post URL and then click INSERT.How to add a link

It’s good blogging etiquette to link to:

  1. A person’s blog if you mention a blogger
  2. The post if you are talking about a particular post on a blog

I suggest you take the time to check out when I’ve chosen to link to a person’s blog as opposed to their post by following the links.

Another reason for linking is bloggers like to check out posts that people write about them. But most will never know you’ve written about them, or visit your blog, unless link to their blog.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Please feel free, anytime, to let me know any information you would like explained!

Meanwhile you might find What’s A Pingback? And How To Write Links helpful!

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Creating Hyperlinks Using HTML

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Image of Photo in Larry's sidebarLast post on The Edublogger introduced HTML basics and showed readers how to use HTML to add their photo to their blog side bar.

As Kate Olsen highlighted, if you use your photo for your blog avatar, a simple alternative is to add the Avatar Widget to your side bar (learn more about Widgets here!). However with Larry’s “blog makeover” I wanted to add words above and below his sidebar photo which is why I used HTML.

In this post, we will look at how you can create hyperlinks using HTML (Learn about HTML Basics here!)

What Is A Hyperlink?

A hyperlink (commonly called links), on a web page, can be an icon, graphic, or word/sentence that, when clicked with the mouse, takes the user to another location on the web site or to another web site.

People will often use HTML to create hyperlinks to helpful web sites when writing comments on other people’s posts.

Here the HTML you use to create hyperlinks:

<a href=”http://theedublogger.com/”>Welcome to the Edublogger</a> produces Welcome to the Edublogger

link.jpg

Here is how I created the Links in Read This Info on Larry’s Blog

I used HTML code for hyperlinks to create a text widget that linked to pages on Larry’s blog which allowed me to reduce the number of pages at the top of his blog (refer to Tips for Blog Makeovers for the reasons why).

Each hyperlink was separated with bullet points using HMTL tags <ul> and <li>

<ul>
<li>potatoes</li>
<li>spinach</li>
<li>lollipops</li>
</ul>

produces

  • potatoes
  • spinach
  • lollipops

Notice you must use the < and > symbols around the HTML Tags and the tag is closed using a ‘/’ (slash) in front of the tag keyword e.g. </ul>

htmlwidget.jpg

Here’s how I created the sub-pages.

pages1.jpg

FINAL THOUGHT

For more experienced widget and HTML users, check out Judy O’Connell’s text widget for displaying Library Things Book Collection.

Another way to add links to your sidebar is using your blogroll which we will cover in the next post.

Other posts in our “blog makeover” series include:

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