For people who run their own blogs, personally or semi-professionally, it can be quite a daunting task to make sure that there’s enough traffic coming in and out of it to allow it to grow and rank well on the search engines. While the style or the purpose of how you run your blog doesn’t really matter, what’s important is that you’re able to find ways to establish those much needed links coming in and out of your blog to help your build it up.
In line with this, I’ve compiled a few useful link building tips that can draw in some much needed link juice into your respective blog:
- Post relevant content for the whole world to read – Yes, yes. I know you’ve heard this line time and again, and you’re probably sick to death of it, but I need you all to say it with me: content is king! However, it’s one thing to write good content and a completely different thing to get people to write it. One thing that you can do about this is to submit your best articles to social portals like Digg, StumbleUpon or Reddit. Take care not to spam these sites with irrelevant or subpar articles though. These can get you voted down and reduce your post’s relevancy. Alternately, you can also try targeting more specialized portals which are related to the theme of your blog.
- Try directory submissions but… – Take special note of the “but” I added there. While a lot of people are questioning the effectiveness of submitting your site to online directories, they are still a good way to draw some valuable link juice if you’re careful about it. You might want to stay away from more general directories, especially if it seems like it may take them a while to process your submission. Instead, it might be a better idea to look for niche directories which are related to your blog. While they might not be as high on the PR chain on Google, they can still get you points for relevancy since it can establish a direct connection between the niche directory and your blog.
- Gain additional leverage through social media – I’d like to think of social media sites like Facebook as the hipper and more happening younger brother of the RSS feeds and email subscriptions. While the latter are still quite popular, some people don’t even bother opening their email and just rely on their favorite social media sites for most of their updates. Using social media to promote your content is a great way to tell your fans, friends or followers that you’ve always got fresh stuff to deliver to them.
- Get involved in guest blogging – This is one way to build up a great relationship with other blogs. It definitely follows the principle of “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” and allows both sites to benefit from the link built between the two. However, try to be considerate about the stuff you want to post on another person’s blog. If you think that an article might be better run on your site, then prioritize your blog first. It doesn’t mean that you should only send low-quality articles as guest posts on other blogs though. As a suggestion, try to keep articles of lasting value on your site and leave the more sensational and temporal ones as guest posts (for example, you can voice your opinion on the recent death of Steve Jobs on someone’s blog).
- Create a segmented blog roll – While reciprocating links through a blog roll is a great link building tactic, it simply isn’t enough to just list down the blogs without giving each a proper description. Aside from that, you might also want to segment your blog roll into different categories and group them together this way. You can have categories for SEO, Internet marketing, social media and so on. Again, this isolates each blog and creates a proper niche which can identify them and recognize your blog for doing so. In turn, this can improve your relationship with them and reciprocate the gesture by linking back to you on their own blog.
Hopefully, this guide was able to give a few of you some new ideas on how to further expand and grow your blog. If you have other ideas on how to help build some useful links to your blog, please feel free to share them with us.
Until then,
Andy
