What you should know first - WHAT IS A TRACKBACK

TrackBacks are fantastic automatic features that come with major blogging platforms likes Wordpress, Nucleus, TypePad, BoastMachine, and Movable Type.  Some blogging systems like Blogger require plugins to have Trackback feature.

If you don’t know what a trackback is, it’s an automate linkage between two blog posts, one that is your own and the other that is on the site you are linking to. It’s an effective method used to communicate back and forth between two blog posts that reference each other and have something in common.

Something else you should know is that Trackbacks will not give you better search engine ranking – why? Because external links in the comments column including TrackBacks do not contribute to your Google Pagerank or any other search engine page rank. Although you might think this is not fair the one good thing to come out of it is the incoming links from other blogs that increases your blog traffic which is what you want.

Trackbacks are a fairly new feature and not many bloggers out there are aware of it or know how to use it. Using Trackbacks and knowing how to use them effetcively can increase your blog traffic. I’m going to explain how to use it along with a few good tips .So lets get started!

How to send a Trackback – STEP BY STEP

What usually happens is you the blogger will read a post on another blog site and if you have something to say about that post then you leave a comment right? Well with a trackback, instead of leaving a comment on THEIR site you leave a comment on YOUR site.

The best way to do this is to write a review about the post/article you have just read and that you want to comment on, it doesn’t have to be long. Make sure your post includes a link back to the original post otherwise it wont send a trackback ping to the other blog. Prior to publishing your post make sure that you include the trackback URL. You will find it at the bottom of the other blogger’s post. Once you find the link copy the Trackback URL and then go to your own blog post you have just created and paste the Trackback URL in the space provided for Trackbacks. If you use Wordpress you will find this towards the bottom of your “Write Post” page. This will send the notification to the blog you linked to otherwise know as a “Trackback ping” It’s that simple!

What now happens is that the other blog you just wrote the post about will receive the “Trackback ping”, (awaiting approval). Once the author of the website has approved your trackback it will automatically display a backlink and a short summary of the article you wrote about in the comments section of their post. For example, take a look at this post “top 9 Christmas Wordpress themes” and see how the first commentator has used trackback that contains a backlink to their site.

In saying all this you don’t necessarily have to know how to use Trackbacks in order to use them, because by default I think the newer versions of Wordpress have tracking features enabled so you can simply create a new post and send Trackbacks automatically and vice versa you can receive trackbacks as well. You will be notified by email when you receive new Trackbacks the same way it does when you recive new comments.
To check if you have it enabled or not follow the guidelines below:

1. Go to Options > Discussion and Check the two following checkboxes 

• ‘Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article.’ (This option has to be checked in order to send Trackbacks)
   
• ‘Allow link notifications from other Weblogs. (This option has to be checked in order to receive Trackbacks)

5 Trackback Tips - How to use Trackback Effectively

1. Leave a comment as you would do normally on the post before sending a trackback. This way the author recognises you are interested in their article and they remember you better, it helps to build a better relationship. 
2. Make sure when sending Trackback pings that your blog post is relevant to the one you are referring to. Otherwise, your post might not be accepted or worse still might end up in the span net.
3. Send Trackback pings to high traffic blogs like problogger and popular blog posts. You can Google these in seconds. This will send some of their traffic to your blog.
4. Send Trackbacks to blogs that have similar content as your own so that people reading their article will also be interested in reading yours.  For example if your blog is about blogging for money then link to another blog or post that is also about the same or similar topic.
5. Use eye catchy titles that people will notice. Remember that a popular post you want to send a trackback ping to may have hundred of comments already so make yours standout that will make potential visitors want to click on it and read.

How to send a TEST Trackback

Ok so now you know what a Trackback is and to use them lets have a go and sending a TEST trackback. If you want to have a go at trackbacks to see how they work you can send a Trackback to this post. Simply copy the Trackback url for this post, (http://bloggerholic.com/blog-marketing/increase-blog-traffic-using-trackbacks-109.htm).
Go to your blog; write a new post talking about this post and paste the trackback url  somewhere within your post content
and hit publish.

If your ping worked, you should see your Trackback on the comments section of this page at the bottom.

For more information about Trackback you can read the article “introduction to trackbacks” by Problogger (Darren Rowse).