I’ve read about it a lot of times. One of the ways to increase the popularity of your blog is to have a resources page to your blog. I never did quite understand the concept though.
A resources page is one where you list down links to other sites which may be of interest to readers. They may or may not be related links. But how do they increase the popularity?
I’ve tried to include a resources page on the blog, and found that it is sometimes difficult to maintain it. Because, you get emails everyday from people asking for inclusion in the list, free of charge. Just because you decided to list a few guys free of charge, it doesn’t mean that you can add everyone for free. And at the same time, you can’t charge everybody too. It’s a difficult situation to handle.
Another problem is the relevancy of the links. If at all you decide to include everyone for free, just because you don’t want to compromise on the quality, and want to list down every possible resource, it is difficult to filter out the frauds from the good ones. You can;t just go about adding everyone to the page.
A solution to this problem is to ask everyone you list down to link back to you. But this is against the Google guidelines, so you may want to stay away from it unless they decide to link to you themselves. But anyway, it doesn;t benefit you in anyway, if not for some traffic.
So if at all you have a links/resources page on your blog, you may want to check the following.
- Keep the resources relevant, and not link to unwanted sites
- Keep the list in order, if possible sort them by some criteria
- Do not include links looking at their domain name alone, have a good check on the content before you add it
- Do not ask these sites to link back to you
- Keep the links limited to a category, do not mix them up
- Ask feedback from readers to check if they find the links useful
- Ask the readers if they found a broken link or irrelevant one
- Check the links regularly
A resources page is after all meant for helping the readers rather than just creating a link farm. So give top priority to the quality of the links, if you can’t find good relevant ones, I suggest that you take out the resources page.
Monika @ The Writers Manifesto | November 10th, 2007 at 12:24 am #
Hi Mani,
These are valuable thoughts. I thought about this myself on my own blog not so long ago, but in the end I think it is better to include these type of resources into a blog post rather than on a separate page.
Unless of course you have a SEO blog offering SEO services for free.
Monika
Fred @ Newest on the Net | November 10th, 2007 at 10:24 am #
I think that resource pages are very useful to your readers. It is a good way to show off your older content too.
Kevin | November 11th, 2007 at 9:04 am #
I have thought about adding a directory or resources page here for a while. I think a well maintained resources or links area would prove popular with most blogs.
Rob O. | November 13th, 2007 at 6:38 am #
This seems quite similar to a blogroll. I’m not a big fan of blogrolls, favoring instead to liberally pepper my blog posts with inline links. That gives me the opportunity to not only make available a link to a blog or site that I like, but also to “sell” my readers on why I think the link is worth clicking.
That said however, I do have a static Favorite Sites page that I use to feature resources and area websites. I don’t update it very often tho, usually reserving my time & energy for blog content instead.