One of the first tips I was given when i started to blog that I’ve not talked about for a while here is to consider making the titles of your posts live links (permalinks).
These days most blogging software does this automatically for you – however today as I’ve surfed around the web I’ve seen quite a few blogs that do not do it. Instead they link to the individual pages on their blog with the word ‘permalink’.
I hope they’ll forgive me but let me give you a couple of examples on two of my favorite blogs – A View from Home and Micro Persuasion. You’ll see in both instances that if you put your cursor over their post titles that they are not live links and that they have the ‘permalink’ link to their individual pages.
Of course some bloggers are more traditional in their approach and like this approach (and I think there can be some valid reasons for doing so) – however in my experience – making the title of your post a live link can have some significant benefits.
The greatest of these benefits is that it helps with Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engines rank sites on many factors – but one of these is that the words used in links linking to a page carry a lot of weight in how that page is ranked for those terms. It is not just how other external sites link to you either – it is the way in which your site is interlinked that counts also.
Take for example Steve’s post ‘Go Behind the Scenes at Rocketboom‘. If he’d made the titles on his front page, category pages, date archive pages and even his individual pages live links he would probably rank higher in Google in a few times for the term ‘Rocketboom’ than he will by just linking to those pages with the word ‘permalink’.
You’ll see that I’ve used this system here at ProBlogger – everywhere there is a title it’s a live link.
