Linking Blogs and Websites

This article looks at the answers to a very common question on the Blogger help forum: "How do I link my blog on blogspot to my web site?"

There are many ways of linking blogs and websites.

The simplest is to give them mutual links, ie put a link to the blog onto the website, and a link to the website onto the blog.

The major advantage is simplicity - but there are disadvantages because you have to maintain two separate sites, your readers/customers may get confused or may miss the link, and it may not be good for attracting search traffic - although this  only matters if you are replying on search to bring visitors to your blog.

Another option is to use RSS feeds to display content from one site (blog, website) on the other.   These work better for displaying content from sites that keep getting new posts, rather than sites that have updates made to existing posts:  usually your blog is the site that gets new posts, so you may want to put an RSS feed from it onto your website.

Or you could display the content of one site (website or blog) right inside the other site:   <iframe> statements provide this option.

Mutual Links

Putting a link to your blog onto your website

To do this, you will need to talk to whoever built your website, and probably pay them to change it:  you cannot control your website from inside your blog, unless your website was built with Blogger in the first place.

They will (should, anyway) ask you some questions about how you want it to work, for instance:

• Where should the "blog" link go on your website?
• What happens when someone clicks it - are they taken to your blog, or to a view of it that opens inside your website?
• Should it be a link at all, or do you just want a "feed" of blog posts to show up in a window inside your website?

Putting a link to your website onto your Blog:

You do this same way you'd do any other link.

If you want it in an individual Post, then write the post, choose the text where you want the link to be, and choose Link.  Then enter your website as the URL.

If you want it in the sidebar, header or footer, then:

• Follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, 
• Choose which type of Gadget to use (eg a picture gadget), and enter your website's address (URL) as the "link to" or similar option.  (The options that are available depend on what sort of gadget you use).

If you want it to be a menu bar entry (similar to ones set up by the Pages feature) - then you will have to do some work in the menu.  There is more detail about this in Putting your Posts into Pages in Blogger.

RSS Feeds

Put a feed from your blog inside your website

It is possible to build a RSS-feed from a Blogger blog.   The best way is to use Feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com), which gives you a range of options about how this feed should work.   You can even make several different feeds, each of which has slightly different features.

Therefore, provided your website is built in a tool that can display RSS feeds, the people who maintain it should be able to set it up to take a "feed" from your blog.

This means that you keep updating the blog within blogger, but that the words you write are taken into the website.   What is taken in probably does include the formatting you used (bold, italics, centering etc) and links that you used, but probably won't include

• the colour scheme 
• things that are in the sidebars, header and footer.   

And the overall layout will look a bit different to how it looks in your blog


Another option, especially if the people who built your website don't know very much about RSS feeds or Blogger, is to shift your blog onto some other system that is already integrated with your website or web-host (that you simply haven't been using up 'til now).   Under this option:

• You will need to learn how to use a new blogging system (which may not be quite as easy as Blogger)
• You may or may not be able to import the content of your current blog in blogger
• The new blog will look different, and will have different features to the ones you have in blogger.
• Your readers will need to be told where you new blog is

Shifting to a different blogging system may be cheaper initially (especially if your web-hosting-plan already includes a blogging feature that you're just not using).  It may not be cheaper in the long term (Blogger is free:  a blogging-tool inside web-hosting company may chaarge an extra annual fee like you already pay for your website).   Make sure that costs (initial and on-going) are discussed before you decide what to do.

Embedded Displays using iFrame statements

I've seen a comment in the google help forums that you can insert a web-page using an iframe, like this:

<iframe
allowtransparency="true" scrolling="yes" frameborder="0" width="600" height="800"

src="YOUR BLOG URL, INCLUDING THE HTTP:/"
>
TITLE-FOR-THE-FRAME
</iframe>

I have yet to try this out, but if it works as well as I suspect, it could be a very powerful technique to displaying content either way (but not both ways at the same time - that would be an infinite loop).

This would put some Blogger functionality re leaving comments inside your website, so - I think - you would not be able to sell access to the website because that violates Blogger's Terms and Conditions about re-sale.

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Putting your Posts into Pages in Blogger.

Setting up Google Analytics for your blog

Using your custom domain for something other than Blogger

Is search traffic relevant for your blog?