Blog Trackbacks - Use Them to Your Advantage

Welcome back biz tips readers. I apologize for the long delay since the last post. I moved half way across the country (I now live in Orange County, Calfornia) and my internet was not connected yet, so I have not been online in almost a month. Anyway, today's free home business tips is about blog trackbacks...

Many people don't know what a blog trackback is so let me start off today by telling you what a blog trackback is... A trackback is a type of blog feature that is used to associate blog posts on different blogs - or a way to notify a website or another blog that you have published an entry that references it. The result of this is that two or more different blogs are able to share readers.

The description above is a little hard to soak in so here is an example: Say you just posted an article to your blog about Free Home Business Tips. Now, as you are surfing the internet, you run across a similar or related post on another blog. So, you could use the trackback feature to notify the person who posted the other post about Home Business Tips that there is a similar post on your blog.

When your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, appears on the other blog's post, that blog's readers find out that you have something to say about Home Business and may even pay your blog a visit to find out more.

In order to create a trackback, you have to get the trackback URL from the post where you want to send your trackback notification. It will be shown on the blog as a Trackback URL or possibly a Permalink. Once you have found it, copy the URL into the correct place in your blog's post. Your blog software will have some notation like Trackback URL identified for where the Trackback URL would go.

Once you have done this, save and republish your blog. Your blog software will automatically send the Trackback ping to the target blog's post. So now your trackback, which is the permalink to your post, will be listed on the other blog's post after that blog owner has approved it.

The trackback feature works by actually sending a ping from your blog to the blog you are trackbacking to notify them of your post. This also causes your post to be listed on the other blog, after it has been approved of course.

Trackbacks should be used to elaborate on or add to a related post. So if your post is on Free Home Business Tips, your trackback on another blog should also be about that related subject. Blog comments can be used for posting non specific comments on blogs where trackbacks are topic related specific posts.

You may have noticed that by trackbacking you are essentially placing your link (permalink) on another blog, which creates a backlink to your blog. For this reason, when you set up your blog, modify the permalink structure to be more search engine friendly. This can be done a few different ways, but you want a structure that ends up having keywords in it as opposed to having more dynamic looking links.

By having the backlinks to your blog and by having them relevant to the content of your blog, you now have the ability of improving your blog's page rank. Those backlinks will strengthen both your link popularity and your link relevancy which will bring your blog more organic search engine traffic.

It should be noted that trackbacks should be used with care and NOT used as a method for spamming other people's blogs. Use trackbacks wisely and they can help you out a lot.

Did you enjoy this post? Show it some love...