All bloggers spend a lot of time writing content that they both want read and when called upon to incite action from their readers (aka buy something will you please). A simple “must do” on your blog / or website is to set up the hyperlinks (links) so that they open in a new tab /window versus opening in the same tab on top of your blog post.
Of course this is my preference and you may have your own, but why would you share information about someone else and completely point your reader away from your own page (possibly for good) because the page they opened sucked them in. All of us have had this happen, your happily surfing away, found some great information, which lead to more information and multiple pages later you either forgot where you started and are not interested in going back for at least right now. Or when you try to go back in your browser one of the pages doesn’t let you go back or times out, or you close the tab.
Yes you could probably look in your history, but if you’re any thing like me there are so many sites to choose from and time is premium, it I don’t immediately see it I figure, I really didn’t need to be there any way.
One could argue that the reader aka surfer really wasn’t that interested in the first place or that readers come back. The reality is your readers that love you probably will come back, but some one new that found you through searching or PPC may not have even noted the name of your blog just yet and is now multiple websites and blogs away.
If you used PPC to get them there you just paid to have someone else to take your traffic. Ouch.
Ok, I’ll stop rambling and get to the point.
How to DIY Tutorial: set up links that keep traffic on your blog
Here’s how to manually set up your links / hyperlinks using some easy html so that when you send someone to a link (for reference) it opens a new tab within Firefox.
<a href=”kneedeepblog.com” target=”_blank”>Knee Deep Blog in a New Window</A> (This is what you will see if you click on the “HTML” tab in your post)
Within Wordpress, click on the hyperlink button, and select “Open link in a new window”, click update
Knee Deep Blog in a New Window (This is the actual link your readers will see)
If you choose to have the link open is the same window, when someone clicks on the link they will go to the website in the same “tab” that your site was on.
Now that I’ve got you thinking that all links should be target=”_blank” there are definitely times when you want readers to go to a different page and not come back to the page they started on. For example: the initial page is telling them to take an action and the initial information is not relevant once they’ve gone to the next page - perhaps a sales page, or they signed up for something.
Here’s the HTML code that you would use: target=”_top” or target=”_self”
<a href=”kneedeepblog.com” target=”_top”>Knee Deep Blog in a New Window</A> (This is what you will see if you click on the “HTML” tab in your post)
In wordpress you will pick the other option from the insert/edit link box which is open link in same window.
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