Forget all about PageRank. Fill your posts with links to related posts, on your blog, and more importantly, on other blogs. Don’t hoard PageRank, and try to keep visitors on your site. Send them to other sites, and hope they come back. If you have a good blog, they will.

A little counterintuitive, isn’t it? You send your visitors away, in order to get more?

Yep. It works because, by linking to someone, you’re ending up on their proverbial radar. If they notice that you’ve linked to them, there’s a good chance they will read your post, and possibly link back. If everyone was stingy with their links, the web wouldn’t work very well, would it? You wouldn’t have traffic from people linking to your posts. As a reader, even, you would have a much harder time finding things, and would miss-out on posts that you would find useful. Without links, the web wouldn’t be the web.

But the New York Times doesn’t ever link to anyone!

No, they don’t. Most of the Dead-Tree Media (or Dinosaur Media) don’t really understand the web. They don’t really like it much either. They would prefer to hang onto their existing, failing, business model. Since they can’t do that very well, they try to “break the web,” and make it work the way they want. They hoard PageRank, and try to keep people on their site, where they’ll be bombarded with ads, and help to inflate their traffic stats. Oh, and sometimes they don’t like it when you link to them either…

Link, and you will get links. That’s how the blogosphere works.

I’m participating in the Daily Blog Tips tutorial contest. Since contestants are supposed to post a list of their favorite entries, I’m going to post mine here. I’ve rounded up the ones I like, which I think readers of Webmaster-Source may find useful.

Wondering what post I submitted? How to Feature Your Best Posts in Your Sidebar, which I wrote not long after seeing the contest. It was in my mental list of “Things That Would Make Good Tutorial Posts, If I Can Remember Them.” The contest got me to invest some time actually writing it (Thanks, Daniel!).

Here are my favorites from the list of entries (and I say again that you may find them useful): (more…)