Give Good Link Karma

We all know that one of the hallmarks of participating in a blogging community is the ability to "link back" to each other. This means when you mention a neat post Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings blog you don't just type out the name of his blog. You also embed a hyperlink so that readers can easily be transported to Randy's site without having to manually enter the URL or copy and paste it into the address bar of their Web browser.

There is a way you can take this one step further and not only help out your readers, but your blog as well: make sure that clicking the link will cause it to open in a new browser window or tab.

WordPress

1. Highlight the string of text to be embedded with the link, and click the Insert/Edit Link icon. The Insert/Edit Link dialog appears:



2. Select Open Link In New Window in the Target field and click Insert.

3. If you want to see what this command looks like in code, click the HTML tab.



4. You will see that target="_blank" appears at the end of the link code.

Blogger

Unfortunately, Blogger does not have an automated way to designate the target for an embedded link. If you remember the Embedding Links In Comments post here a few weeks ago, you learned how to type the HTML code for a link.

All you have to do is click the Edit HTML tab when editing your post:



Simply add target="_blank" within the first section of the code to tell the browser the manner in which you want the link opened.

Besides making your readers happy, this trick will also keep the "focus" on your blog posting at all times.

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