One of the greatest deceptions regarding website administration is the belief that quality content is enough to generate large volumes of traffic to a website. SEO gurus and industry experts claim that as long as you write great blog posts on new, innovative and interesting topics you will get noticed, linked to etc. This article recommends a different, a bit more diverse approach – introducing the importance of backlink building and onsite optimization.
If you know what’s good for your blog, PageRank and Google rankings you’ll give what we are about to say some considerable thought.
Natural backlinking to your blog
Interesting articles, never-seen before images/videos and content that gets the visitor’s attention get links – backlinks to use industry terms. However, getting natural links back from other websites to your blog is rather ineffective and normally only generate a small number compared to how many links you can get back with some extra effort.
Building backlinks
The leading and most popular websites have a large number of natural backlinks. A lot of people and website administrators link to Wikipedia.org for example, a non-profit site that depends solely on its users. More commercial sites however, also spend a lot of time and resources on “building” backlinks rather than just sitting back and hoping that people will link to them.
Search engines like Google rates a website 80% based on its value in proper backlinks, so it is safe to say that working to get relevant and proper links to your blog is the safest way to increase traffic and pagerank. This is how you do:
Go to Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool – get relevant keywords that match your blog post’s topic. Implement them in the title, meta data, headers and subheaders. Diversify, so that your post may rank on as many search terms as possible.
Contact a site owner
Start by contacting other blogs that feel relevant to your own and ask the site owner if you can contribute with an interesting blog post. By scrolling through blog engines you will find relevant blogs to contact. Wordpress.com or Blogspot both host a large number of blogs. Make sure to contact many blogs, since you will only get replies from a small percent of them.
Link back
After you have communicated with the site owner, decided on a topic, the fact that you will include some links and actually written the very interesting blog post, insert one or two links back to your site. Depending on the size of the post you can add more but normally two links is good. Link back to your blog using any of your selected keywords, to increase your Google ranking and post PageRank on that search term.
On site optimization
The importance of a search engine optimized website cannot be excluded. By building backlinks you will increase your blog’s availability in the search engine. But to tweak your own pages and posts to perfection make sure you always fill in the meta data and include keywords in titles and headers.
Brad’s Note: Special thanks to Chris Reynolds of Web Hosting Search for this awesome article. On his site you will find various articles and ratings about Wordpress Hosting as well as Blog Content Management Systems. If you are interested in writing a guest post for this blog, feel free to send me a note!
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16 Comments
Great post buddy. Those are great ways to get links and traffic. Hopefully people will listen to you because that is the only way you will be getting links.
Doing guests posts not only helps in getting back links with relevant anchor texts but also improves your brand and subscribers
Nishadha’s last blog post..Performancing Ads Affiliate program changes
Nice post! Building traffic through link building is an essential step to creating a successful website. Asking bloggers for links can be kind of nerve wracking in the beginning, but once you build up confidence and refine your emailing skills, you’ll be building links in no time!
Thanks Brad and Chris for the good reminder. Very easy to get swallowed up in the belief that publishing good content is all that is needed. For this SEO/SEM newbie continue to be reminded it’s a holistic approach that succeeds in the end.
I use Micro Niche Finder to find less competitive keywords to target for SEO traffic.
Fear Of Long Words’s last blog post..By: admin
Excellent strategy. i would suggest however, that for the first guest post (or first couple guest posts) on a new blog, you stick to the bio for links….never assume a blog owner is going to be OK with sticking contextual links in an article until he/she knows you better.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..What Criteria Factors Into Your Link Love/Round-Up Posts?
I think it can be Brad, over time. Pure content won’t succeed in a couple months, or maybe even half a year. But with enough time, and consistent informative posts, I think a blog with little marketing could succeed. Though with that said, the best option would be to jsut do both. Great post.
Jonathan Muller’s last blog post..102 Blogging Tips All Bloggers need to Know
@ BlogExpert – Glad you liked the post, I really enjoyed it as well.
@ Nishadha – Ahh Guest Posting.. Theres nothing quite like it. (Opening your writing style to sooo many more people on other blogs with just a simple article)
@ Corey – It also helps if you have a well designed website that isn’t cluttered with ads or looks like its trying to sell text links.
@ Ben – Its a good wakeup for everyone.. Although this article does it much more effectively.
@ Fear – Hmmm, Never heard of it.. That program sounds like something I would use however.. To Google.com!
@ Dennis – Dually noted. Although your not getting the PR link juice from the homepage, it still gets your brand name out there.. which is the important part.
@ Jonathan – I think the main idea behind this post is networking with other bloggers through guest posts and back links. Great content is good, but Google won’t associate the great content with any credibility because it doesn’t have any authority from other websites.
Indeed. My main point being though, you do not want the blog owner thinking something like, “Hmm, I don’t know you from a hole in the wall…I allow you the honor of guest posting on my blog…and you stick links right in the middle of the article back to your blog??”
Yea, that ain’t a good relationship builder.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..What Criteria Factors Into Your Link Love/Round-Up Posts?
Content is never enough for blogs these days. There are so many new blogs now that everyone is writing the same thing and doing the same thing. You have to do something WAY different to gain that traffic.
-Mike
Definitely a goal for this year – backlinking. My blog is a whopping 3 months old & now that I (sort of) have the hang of things, I need to REALLY increase traffic. I wish that it were as easy as it sounds though. Do you have any suggestions for finding or more importantly ASKING other sites to do this with you?
Zipporah Sandler’s last blog post..Put a little extra money in your pocket – start a small business
The whole SEO and internet marketing campaign of a website will not be complete without backlinks. Backlinks are the backbone of SEO, thus it should be given proper focus and concern to achieve top search engine ranking as well as traffic.
Growing backlinks using guest post approach is a good idea. Based on the fact that I’ve (so far) never turned down someone asking to guest post on my blog, it’s easy to approach bloggers to do guest posts. It’s also a win-win situation for both.
Peter Lee
Contributing a guest post is also a great way to build relationships and perhaps future linking to each others site content
This is very useful post for me…I was really interested in building backlinks…Though I am getting them but I need to put in some extra effort to get those backlinks…
Yup, great content without proper marketing is useless. So I am doing my marketing now.
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