How to Trackback and Why You Should

You may not be asking how to trackback and that may be because you don’t know the potential in using trackbacks… yet. However, this week we’re going to be focusing on trackbacks. What they are, how you get them and why you would even want to think about them!

What is a trackback?

Trackbacks and pingbacks, from what I can tell, are about the same thing. It’s wordpress software’s way of notifying another site that you mentioned them over at your site.

Each time you link to another site from your site (if it’s a wordpress site) they will receive a trackback ping. It’s a little note that tells them you mentioned them.  These little notes are pretty cool for a couple reasons.

1. Traffic:  They let someone know you’ve been talking about them. When someone talks about me, I like to know what they said so I go and check it out. Which means: Traffic. Yeah, only one person (the other blog owner) BUT if they like your content they may keep coming back to see what you have to say. If they continue to like what you have to say they may very well tell their readers that they like what you say, and then even more traffic. And we like that.

2. Links: When the blog owner gets the trackback ping (message you’re linking to them) they have the option to publish that message in the comments area of their blog.  These trackbacks and pingbacks are actually published ABOVE regular comments. The pingback uses the title of your post as the comment. If you’ve used your keywords well in the title (AS YOU SHOULD) you will have a perfect keyword anchor text link pointing back to your site.  You will probably also get some traffic from the pingback when people scroll down after reading the post to comment. (just as you do when you leave comments ~ but you’ve gotten to use keywords for the anchor test instead of your name.)

Why would I want to link to other people from my blog?

I hope this question is self explanatory ~ but ~ just in case.  We’ve been talking about building relationships with other people in your niche, other blog owners. These relationships can be a great way to find places to guest post, find partners to work with, and find people who love your stuff and want to promote your posts because they love it.

What better way to get to people’s hearts (and get their attention) than mentioning them, recommending them on your blog, to your readers? There is, in my estimation, not a better way to jump start a relationship than with trackbacks.

Who do I link to?

You may notice on Friday I offered some links to posts that were related to the topic of the week. That’s exactly how you do it. You find someone else who is talking about a subject you’re talking about, preferably in a way other than you are covering it, and then link to them. It’s great to link to the specific post. You don’t have to use keywords you think the post is about, but what a great way to say hello ~ a nice keyword anchor text, in content link? I’d say hello, and probably thank you. Especially if it was a quality post about something I’m passionate about. What blogger doesn’t want people to send them more traffic? No one, I don’t care who you are or how much traffic you get, new traffic from new sources is always welcome.

If you’ve picked up Dave’s networking book (if not, why not? It’s fantastic and free) I suggest you use this method to start getting on the radar of the people you’ve chosen in those worksheets. This is a great way to start getting on the radar screen of those people. It may not work for the A lister blogs, but their support people? Absolutely.

Publishing Trackbacks on your own site.

Should you or shouldn’t you? There are people who will use this technique JUST to get links. They’ll write crappy content or worse yet, they’ll scrape your RSS feed and use YOUR content. That’s called trackback spam and you’ll get pingbacks on all of this stuff. Every time someone links to YOU you will get a pingback. Whether you decide to publish pingbacks on your site is completely up to you.

I do publish trackbacks from REAL content on REAL sites. I will NOT publish trackbacks from people that write content of no value or use MY content to fill their site. I will not give them the link. However, I’m happy to help people out who are using this technique as a way to connect and provide quality information to their readers.

Where do I see these pingbacks?

Mine come to my email, since I have it set up in wordpress for all comments to come to me so I can see them. Pingbacks and trackbacks are treated just like comments in wordpress. So if you’ve got it set up that way you’ll see them come through your email. I usually take a quick look to make sure the content isn’t mine, and then approve them. I also leave a comment on the post if the inclination strikes me. A “thank you” for linking to me is always appreciated by other bloggers, and can help get conversation going/flowing on their site as well.

So that’s about it for how to trackback. On Wednesday we’re going to be talking about writing posts to get trackback links, so stay tuned. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments section.