This post seems obvious, but sometimes obvious things still need to be said, wrote this over 8 years ago.
So once you have folks reading your site, you don’t really want them wandering away, without looking at your advertisers, or better still looking at other things on your site.
The problem being, if you simply put HTTP links for other sites (which you need to do, to help your rankings), then usually your page disappears from the reader’s browser and the new pager replaces it. Typically a link like this looks like:
< href=”https://www.canajunfinances.com/”>Canadian financial rants has an interesting article on vomiting
Well this is great for the Canadian Financial site because you are sending folks over to his site (that’s me by the way), however, your site now disappears from the browser. You can however with one added command fix this.
< href=”https://www.canajunfinances.com/” target=”_blank”>Canadian financial rants has an interesting article on vomiting
This now causes your reader’s browser to open a new window for this link, and keeps your page in tact so they can wander off and read your linked pager, but then come back to your page by going back to their original browser window. I don’t remember who pointed this one out to me, but it is a good idea, I think.
Addendum: An important thing to add to a link if you have a link that is either paid for, or doesn't really fit in the flow of your post and that is the rel="nofollow" as well.