How to encourage people to link to your blog
Nov 06, 2008
It is one thing to start a blog with great passion but it is quite another to increase and ensure a steady flow of visitors to your blog whether you are publishing a personal blog or a business blog. A great, and most probably indisputable way of getting traffic to your blog is by optimizing your design and content for search engines and getting highly targeted traffic from there. The second option is encouraging more and more people to link back to your blog.
Your blog gets noticed and gains popularity when people link to your blog quite often. It is a fact - links are stills the basic connectors, the basic relationship, on the web. Besides, links are going to be the easiest means for a search engine algorithm to evaluate the trustworthiness and significance of any web page. Why would people link to your blog if you haven’t got something worth linking for? People link to content that is valuable and this is why search engines like Google give more importance to websites and blogs that have external links, lots of external links on other websites and blogs.
Linking is both an active as well as a passive activity. Of course your content can encourage people to link to your blog but how do you make them aware of your content unless they are on their own finding your content through search engines? Unless people know that your blog exists they won’t be able to link to it even if they want to link to it. It becomes a vicious circle if you don’t proactively promote your blog and encourage people to link to it or to your individual posts. This is why you need a well laid out strategy to get external links:
- Build a content rich blog: This is a given but since it is so important we cannot avoid mentioning it. Continuously generate highly relevant and useful content for your blog to not only provide quality content to your visitors but also create sufficient reason for people to link to your blog. Optimize your blog content using relevant keywords so that people trying to find pages and blog posts to link to can easily find your content on the search engines. This makes it mandatory that you create highly focused content on individual blog posts so that they can cater to the appropriate tastes.
- Contact other similar sites: Link to other sites that have the same scope as your blog. Once you link to them, you can ask for a reciprocal link. But you can save yourself of this trouble, if your build a blog that is rich in content, informative, and most importantly unique and original; people will automatically approach you for a link in their site.
- Have your blog listed at Yahoo and other directories: Though this would mean that you yank out your wallet, it still is worth the price as it is definitely one of the best links that you can get. Directories are often highly trusted sources for quality links and many search engine algorithms attach higher weightage to links that have got a place in various directory listings. Perform the necessary research to identify the most appropriate category and get that title and description optimized. Interestingly this is the place where “Link relevancy” comes from.
- Submit to different specialty Search Engines and directories: Identify the best search engines and directories that are best fitted for your blog and submit your link to them.
- Cross link: If you have your own website and also run multiple blogs, then you can have your link appear on the website and other blogs.
As you advance in your blogsphere, you will learn more about better venues of link building like:
- High Trust Links – these come from very specific online places and respected editors.
- Topically Relevant Links – these are “Hub” sites within your niche that are run by real people, not by reciprocal link clubs.
- Quality Links – these are from subject specific search engines that are a fit just for your content and features.
Try these time-tested tips to encourage more people to link to your blog.
Posted by Amrit Hallan | Tags: Blog Promotion
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