Do not let visitors leave your blog!

The simple but effective method of keeping your readers on your site is - creation hyperlinks open in a new window when they are clicked.

Why Define Hyperlinks to Open a New Window?

"Why would one want to have their links open in a new window?", you might ask. The primary, and probably the only reason a blogger would do that - is to trying to keep the user on their site as long as possible. You provide the reference link in the text of your posts not just because you want you reader to go away. In some cases, reader might come back after reviewing the site where you sent him, in some case, he will stay there, move further, or just close the online session. If you have the hyperlink opening a new window in every case, it will be easier for your visitor to come back to your site, when he is done with exploration of the link, you created. And he will be able to painlessly resume investigation of your own site after coming back.

When you provide internal links, directing to your own content, this issue is not very important, since your visitors does not leave actually your site, but just continues its exploration. Opening every time a new window, when customer clicks a new link, is not recommended, since your reader might get a feeling that you are spamming him. He will get annoyed and leave.

But if you are referring to another blog or web site, have a new window opened to display the web page, while keeping your own page in the background.

Create a Hyperlink That Opens a New Window

The basic structure of a hyperlink looks like this:

<a href="http://internet-traders.blogspot.com">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

If you use this code, the clicking on the link will lead the clicker to the new location. To manually change the hyperlink properties, forcing to open a new window on every click, requires code modification. Just add one more property to the ’a’ tag to make it do what we want.

All we need to add is:

target="_blank"

Just like the href property/value pair (href="some value"), you need simply to include the target="_blank" to the ’a’ tag of your hyperlink. Here is what the finished hyperlink will look like:

<a href="http://internet-traders.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Online Stock Trading for Beginners</a>

Some desktop software HTML authoring utilities are able to provide this functionality as an option for you when you create a hyperlink. For example, Post2Blog, I use can do that easily. But if you use online Blog editor, like Blogger, you do not have ready to go option for the hyperlinks properties modification. You need to review the HTML source, find the ’a’ tag you want to modify and then add the target="_blank" value pair to the hyperlink definition.