You have probably read all there is to know about getting people to link to your blog before, and this post doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. This is merely a nice trick to get many people to link to you, without having to do much work.

Basically, the more people who links to you, the higher your blog ranks in search engines. There are many details to this, but that’s a totally different story written by much smarter people than me.

The trick

This has worked extremely well for me for a long time and it is very easy to pull off. It works no matter what blog platform you use.

You probably have designed your own theme or modified an existing one for your blog. It probably looks really nice too. That’s exactly what Tom Watts thought about my old theme for dasBlog and therefore asked me if it was ok that he included it into the next release of dasBlog. Of course it was. At that point I had already made the theme available for download for anyone interested and a lot of people actually did (I can’t imagine why).

The trick is that I added a piece of text to the bottom of the theme which linked back to my own blog. It looked something like this:

dasBlog theme by Mads Kristensen

That sweet traffic

Almost from one day to another, people started to use my theme and links started coming in. After a couple of months when the search engines had done their indexing, my blog got much better ranking because of all the links.

Now I receive a lot of search engine traffic as well as general link traffic and I can thank the theme for a big part of it. So, now you might wonder how to get your theme included in your blog platform of choice.

Get your theme out there

Many of the smaller and mid-sized blog platforms such as dasBlog, Subtext and BlogEngine.NET are probably more than willing to include a nice theme because they might not have that many and they all want to offer as much out of the box as possible. Just write to them and ask if they are interested in including your theme.

For the big platforms such as WordPress and MovableType you probably can’t get your theme bundled. Instead you can add your theme to the various theme sites where people can download themes and also have the download available on your own blog.

It is very easy to get your theme out there with a little effort and the results are noticeable.

For BlogEngine.NET users

After the next release scheduled for this Monday, we are going to release a theme pack with all the themes that didn’t make it into the final release. If you have written a nice theme then we can include it into that pack and into future versions as well. Just remember to add a discrete link to your own blog somewhere.

BlogEngine.NET is designed to be simple and transparent, so that anybody can use all the features in their theme design or extensions without looking to hard for them. All the events can be subscribed to and all properties are exposed on every page or user control in the themes.

However, there is one little feature that hasn’t been announced anywhere – one that most people don’t care about but can mean everything to others.

JavaScript conversion events

A conversion is when a visitor performs an action you would like them to do. In a blog platform it usually means that it is when someone writes a comment or rates a post. Many different web analytics applications such as Google Analytics or Headlight can collect and analyse those conversions by calling a JavaScript function.

When a comment is added or a visitor rates a post, then two different JavaScript functions are called if they exist. The two functions can be added directly to the theme’s master page or added in the tracking script textbox in the admin section.

Adding the functions

To be notified when someone adds a comment, just add this method anywhere in the theme’s master page or in the tracking script textbox under settings in the admin section.

function OnComment(name, email, website, country, body)
{
   // Do something… 
}

And to catch when someone rates the post, add this method:

function OnRating(rating)
{
  // Do something…
}

This is not part of the BlogEngine.NET 1.0 release, but it had been part of the source code for a couple of months now. So, if you have the latest source from CodePlex, then you can take advantage of this feature already today. If not, wait a week for the next official release.