Here’s a tip that will help you keep visitors on your site and more engaged for a lot longer. When setting up links within your site, follow this rule of thumb:
Internal links, leading elsewhere within your site should usually be set to open in the same tab or window. For example, if you click this link to the Free Marketing Made Easy podcast page then you will leave this blog post and move over to a new section of that site.
In our case we make an exception for specific podcast episodes like this one. These each open in a new browser tab (or window) so you can listen to an episode without losing track of where you were. After all, you’ll probably be multitasking and listening while you surf, so we try to make that easy for you.
Make sense?
Then there are external links that actually lead off of your site, like this link to Lou Borton’e website Online Video Branding. Go ahead and click on it, and you will notice that a new window opens. You should always configure your external links this way, to give people an easy option of returning back to your site. Otherwise, there is a very good chance that they will get distracted by that new, external site, and forget to return to your page.
So how do you do it?
In WordPress, this is easy, because you can design your pages and posts in either a Visual Editor or an HTML editor.
Internal Links:
- In the Visual Editor just choose the text you want to link and set the target to open in the same window (from a drop down menu – see below).
- In the html editor you just use a standard tag like this: “<a href=”http://freemarketingmadeeasy.com/”>Free Marketing Made Easy”</a>
External Links:
- From the Visual Editor just choose the text you want to link and set the target to open in a new window (from the drop down menu – see below).
- In the html editor you use that same standard tag line, and add “target= “blank” at the end of it like this: <a href=”http://freemarketingmadeeasy.com/” target=”blank”>Free Marketing Made Easy</a>
AfriGadget
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