I have a blog. I was recommended to "link to other blogs". What does this mean and how do you do it?

They probably mean to just create hot links on your home page to other blogs, ask other blogs to create hot links to your blog. Having links to your blog will increase your exposure for Google search.

Linking is when you make text that a web user can click, such as this link to Google. One common way to add a link is through HTML. This page will explain what code to write to create a link. Some sites use a different way of linking though – this site for example, to make a link one needs to put the linked words in quotes, followed by a colon then the URL. There are other ways as well, read the site’s rules and you’ll probably be able to figure it out.

You’ll get tons of visitors if you participate in digital communities related to your blog. Usually when one leaves a comment on another blog, you have the option of including a web link, so put your blog’s site here and leave a thoughtful comment. People who read your comment and are impressed by you (or simply curious) will click on the link and get to your blog.

Part of Google’s PageRank algorithm is based on how many other external websites link to your blog – the more links you have from different sites, the more credible you appear to be, thus the PageRank goes up. To best utilize this, find related blogs and do a “link-share” – you put the other blog’s link on your blog, and that author puts your link on their blog. Usually the best place to put these links is in a “blogroll” which is just a fancy term for a list of links embedded into the page (not a blog post itself). Now this one link won’t have a lot of effect, in fact many links may not have any effect – no one but Google’s engineers truly know how their PageRank algorithm works, and they won’t be telling the world anytime soon.

When you read something in another blog that interests you, make a link to it and respond to it in your blog. People like John Gruber of Daring Fireball mix lengthy essay-like blog posts with short link-and-comment blog posts.

The key is to add valuable content. Google figures out which sites are valuable based on how many people link to them, and what you really want to have happen is to have a site that Google considers valuable link to you. The really valuable sites don’t do “link exchange” nonsense; they link to you when you say something worthwhile.

So link to people who say interesting things, and try to say interesting things and create valuable content so that people will link to you without being bribed.