Link posts are those posts/articles where a blogger links to different articles which he finds interesting and which may not his own articles. This is a common practice in the blogosphere and almost every blogger does a link post occasionally ( or more than occasionally ) .

However I feel that these posts are sometimes taken casually by both bloggers and their readers . Bloggers usually do a link post when they are short of ideas and tend to think it as a way to save time and add another post . On the other hand when readers come across such a post which just has embedded links , they tend to skip it in their feed reader , without having a proper look . I personally used to do the same as a reader but lately I have discovered that link posts can add immense value to a blog and can be very useful to its readers .

Hence I decided to cover the importance of link posts for both bloggers and the readers , because every blogger is a blog reader too and sometimes vice-versa is true as well .

Importance for Bloggers

1 : A Reflection of what you read

Link posts are definitely a reflection of your reading habits and through it your readers come to know what blogs you like and follow . Hence you should be careful with the links which you post and it should not divert from the niche which your blog intends to promote or else it won’t add value to the topics which you have covered in your blog .

2 : An opportunity to link friends

Yes , in these posts you can always link to some nice articles of your friends . This will further help in strengthening your relationship with that blogger . But again , you should not just link due to that reason but instead , make sure that you are linking to valuable content too .

3 : An opportunity to highlight newbies

If you are an established blogger , you are sure to get huge number of emails everyday , especially from new bloggers who are struggling to make their mark in the blogosphere and want a link from you for that purpose . Instead of dumping those emails , I’d recommend you to save them and when you decide to do a link post , you can go through those mails and pick out some good stuff and link to them . That will be a win-win situation for you and the newbie .

4 : SEO Importance

If you think that only inbound links are enough to boost the search engine rankings of your blog , then you should read this article at Problogger . Its true that relevant outbound links to quality sites further help in the SEO process .

Importance for Blog Readers

1 : Quick Access to Information

Link Posts , if crafted well , do not require any deep thinking and the reader can quickly go through it and choose the links which appeal to him and then click and read them . Hence it provides a simple and a quick way to access information and knowledge through your blog .

2 : Discovering New Blogs

I have lost count of the number of blogs which I have discovered through link posts . Its true that if you come across a nice article , you usually tend to find out if the blog has nicer articles and you may discover a new blog which is of your interest andend up subscribing to it .

3 : Discovering things which you probably don’t know about

This point directly relates to the above two points .You click on a link and read the article and if the article interests you , you tend to search the source of thearticle and then you might come across certain things which you didn’t know and you are happy to know .

Hence due to the above mentioned reasons , I strongly recommend you all not to ignore any link post . In Part-2 of this post , I’ll discuss how to add value to your link posts and make it more important for your readers .