I’m sure that for many of you a trackback is as foreign to you as seeing a full set of teeth at a Willie Nelson concert. However, if you’ve been blogging for any time then I’m sure you seen the word around the blogosphere.

A trackback is actually much simpler than it sounds. Let me break it down for you like my 1st grade teacher used to do for me. If you link to another blogger’s article from your blog, then a link back to your site will appear in or around the comments of their article.

Using trackbacks has many advantages and in this article I’m going to explain why you need to jump in and take advantage of them.

It’s one of the best gifts you can give a fellow blogger.

It seems that at every holiday you find yourself bombarded with commercials letting you know what the perfect gift is for your friend or loved one. They have the ideal hair restoration kit for your dad at Father’s Day and they have the perfect necklace for mom at Mother’s day. They have the perfect toys for your kids at Christmas.

Check this out. One of the best gifts that you can give to a fellow blogger doesn’t even cost a penny. Not only that, but you can give it at any time of the year.

Just link to someone’s article and you are presenting them with a tremendous compliment and a gift that is really going to benefit them.

Remember how upset your wife was the lat time you forgot her birthday and didn’t get her anything? Well, most bloggers won’t get upset with you when you don’t link to their posts, but they probably will be very excited and thankful when you do.

It helps drive traffic to your site.

You might be surprised how many people browse through the comments and trackbacks and click through to the user’s websites. I do this nearly every day at the blogs I follow. I figure that if they are reading, commenting, and linking to a site that I really admire then maybe their site will have similar content and be worth looking into.

It increases your Google page rank.

Page Rank is a 1 through 10 numerical indicator that Google assigns to web pages to note how important that page is. Page rank is then used as a factor in determining where a page should be listed in Google’s search engine. Pages with a page rank of 10 will usually get listed above sites with low page ranks.

Not all trackbacks, however, will increase your Google Page Rank. In fact, on most sites they don’t. This is actually exclusive to some sites as most avoid this.

Google’s search bot only follows certain links. Links with the ‘nofollow’ attribute do not count towards page rank. Most webmasters add that tag to comments and trackbacks to avoid getting spammed with people’s useless comments just because they want to build the page rank of their own sites.

At Site Sketch 101, we don’t use nofollow on our comment and trackback links. If you link here, we’ll share the page rank right back to you. This is a great reason why you should consider both commenting and linking to our articles.

It helps you build relationships with other bloggers.

Relationships in every area of life are extremely valuable assets. I’m sure you’ve seen the action movie where a spy calls in a favor from an old CIA operative that he knows.

Blogging is no different. There are things you can accomplish when you have friends that you just can’t get done on your own. You can drive traffic to their site and they can drive traffic to yours which can push both of your stats higher and higher. You may have a big contest going on and you may want to ask them if they would post on it.

But you have to build a relationship with someone before you can start calling in favors.

Linking to one of their articles is a lot stronger of a way to build relationships than most other things. Linking to a site tells the author that you are excited about their work and that you are not ashamed to let your readers know about it.

It builds your own credibility.

A lot of bloggers are afraid to link to other websites or blogs because they fear losing their visitors. Although you may lose some visitors, I believe whole-heartedly that you will gain even more visitors because of the credibility that you gained by sending someone to another site. If people are really pleased with the site that you sent them to then they will respect you and want to come back and see more of your links in the future.

HEY YOU! Yeah…you in the back there. I want your input. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!