We all know the people who visit our blog, that most of them are having an acute shortage of time! Especially the Stumble Upon and EntreCard traffic, which you know is so valuable to make your blog popular and statistics, attractive. If they could skip the time taken in loading a page, somehow, you’d have seen them going away from your blog in less than 2 seconds! If you have got them into reading your blog.. with your quality content.. Still no! they don’t want to right-click on the links in the post and chose to “Open this link in a new window” and keep reading you till the other page has finished loading completely.
When I am reading blogs and quick-click a link to see what’s in there, I feel too distracted if it opens in the same window! Opening links simultaneously in separate windows is much more convenient as you can read whenever and whatever you wish to without having to navigate away from the main page. This is especially good when you’re trying to understand some thing and have to go like to-and-fro between the main page and the reference page often.
Whenever I publish a blog-post or drop a comment at other blogs with some kind of reference link to some other website or a blog, I try my best that I hyper link to a blog/website in such a way that the link opens in a separate browser window or tab (different pages within the same browser window).
How to link?
Whenever you are hyper-linking to any page in a blog post or a comment, care to do it by using the anchor tag (HTML). Links that are automatically parsed by various blogging platforms will open in the same window itself. The use of target=”_blank” attribute within the anchor tag makes the difference, which is not added by default.
Structure of anchor tag:
<a href=”http://www.inspiritblog.com” title=”Inspirit | Blog by Abhinav Sood” target=”_blank”>Click Here to Visit Inspirit</a>
Understanding the anchor tag:
<a></a> : is known as the anchor tag, that is used for converting simple text into links that can be clicked on.
href=”Site URL here” : This attribute defines which web page should open when you click on a link.
title=”Add any kind of description here” : The description inserted in this attribute displays as a tool-tip when you hover your mouse-pointer over the link. Skipping this attribute will not show any description on “mouse-over”.
target=”_blank” : This attribute makes a link load the web page in a separate window or a tab when you click on it. Skipping this attribute means that the page will load in the same window.
<a .. .. .. >ANY TEXT HERE </a> : Any text inserted between <a> and </a> appears as the hyper link that can be clicked.
When writing a post, WordPress offers you to chose whether a link should open in the same window or a new window when you are inserting a link using the visual interface. However, Blogger/Blogspot does not. Also, TypePad doesn’t allow the use of HTML in comments, so you have no choice but to simply write down the site URL as it is. Blogger/Blogspot allows the use of anchor tag in comments but doesn’t allow target attribute, so any link on a blogger/blogspot blog will open in the same window unless you right click on it and chose to open it in a new window. But you can make the best use of this technique of hyper-linking which is probably the most efficient and useful way.
After all, readers are the most valued! 🙂