August 13, 2009
How to do a good blog step 3: Links
This is my third post in a series on how to do a good, and effective blog. Much of this series will be focusing on the SEO aspects of blogging. Obviously there are many other reasons than SEO to blog. Rather that reiterate them in each step in the series, please feel free to take a look at:
which touches on several reasons to blog, and also focuses on choice of the domain name for your blog.
For this post however, the issue is: Links.
This may come as a shock to some people, but no matter how good, or how pretty, or how relevant your blogs is, it might no become successful. There are some very few people who grow their readership organically enough to get the momentum to every really get any good rankings on the search engines. Most blogs have to “play the game” a bit in order to get a jump start and get readership and rankings.
The biggest way to get rankings on the search engines, more so than anything else we have discussed in this series, is inbound links. That is to say, websites out there linking to you. We’ll look a bit at the relevance and value of various links in a moment.
But before we go into inbound links, I want to touch briefly on “internal links”, and outbound links. Internal, or inner links are links from one page on your blog to another page on your blog. Outbound links are links from your blog to somewhere else on the Internet. In the case of both of these, the most important thing is that if the text that someone clicks is “click here”, you should be slapped (okay, maybe you didn’t know better, but a slap can help wake you up and make you alert for this next part, so go ahead anyway.)
When you link to another post on your blog, or to another site on the Internet, you should use descriptive text, just as we did in the article “How to do a good blog Step 2: URL structure” when deciding what to use as the subject line of our posts. If you look at the two links in this article, they are descriptive of the content that they are sending you to, rather than stating:
To Read Step 2 of good blog Creation, click here.
Don’t be afraid to link to your own content (as we have done in this article), in fact do it often… it earns you Google juice. Use this same link text logic when linking to other sites, wiki articles, pictures, or YouTube videos.
But now comes the harder part: inbound links. How do you get people to link to your content? Well for starters, realize that you are one of those “people”. Put links to you blog in all of the social media platforms you use. Have a link in facebook, twitter, linked in, and any others.
As we go over this, I want to point out in a little more detail what I mean: Have a look at the previous paragraph. It points to my twitter, linked in, and facebook pages. This has created inbound links to those pages. As such, it has made those pages more credible in Google’s eyes. Due to that, anything I point to from those pages gets even more credit. Additionally, google looks at those links in this article, and believes that due to the fact that I have links out to sites using the words “facebook” “twitter” and “linked in”, that my blog must be about those subjects (among other things.) As such, I am now more likely to show up for searches if someone is looking for how to use those social media tools in conjunction wit their blogs. Pretty cool, huh? It all becomes very synergistic… one things feeds another, which feeds another.
The next step on your quest for inbound links: create other pages. Squidoo and Hubpages are great places to do this.
Next?
Stop being upset about those you think you are competing against. One of the cool things about blogs is that those who you perceive as competition can actually become link sources, as well as lead flow for you. Go find out who the top blogs are on the subject you are writing about. Chime in on the threads. Comment intelligently. This creates links back to your site. It also makes people who might not have found you otherwise think, “Wow… this person is really sharp on this subject. I need to go see who they are.”
Next on the list: Directories. Go find any directories you can and submit yourself to them.
Another tool I will mention, but I will say proceed with caution, is shotgun link building campaigns. All of the items we have mentioned above are link building strategies. Others that are very effective if carefully managed are asking bloggers to review your product. Another, very effective method is the shotgun link build. This consists of having someone go submit you to literally hundreds of sites, directories, etc. This links provide value. But only as part of an overall link building strategy. If all of your links are “garbage” links from such a campaign, it can actually hurt you. If managed closely however, and enhanced with high value links, this is a very effective method.
Posted in Events
This is my second post in a series on how to do a good, and effective blog. Much of this series will be focusing on the SEO aspects of blogging. Obviously there are many other reasons than SEO to blog. Rather that reiterate them in each step in the series, please feel free to take a look at:
Here’s a hint for you: The “Default” setting is the worst one. I would choose one of the settings that have “sample-post” in them. This alone should help your “Google Juice” a ton.
There are a lot of reasons to have a blog.
