As a blogger, you can promote your blog in many ways, but one of the most important marketing tactics you need to keep in mind is “link building”, or in simpler terms to get other relevant sites to link to your blog.
When your blog has a link coming back from a good site, it’s like a personal recommendation, which carries much more weight compared to someone just stumbling upon your blog from somewhere.
The Internet has become a competitive place to be, which is why getting a good Search Engine Ranking has gone harder. There’s a lot more that you need to do to achieve a good SE listing, simply optimizing your blog for the right keywords won’t do.
Link building has gained a lot of momentum and has become a yardstick for the Search Engines to know the quality of a particular website. They see incoming links to your blog as a form of recommendation or endorsement from other blogs in your niche. So, never pay someone to build your link and trash any thoughts about buying links. Building links yourself still remains the best way to do it. Given below are a few steps that you need to follow when you’re building links:
1. Have a Goal and Be Persistent in Your Approach
Let’s face it, link building takes time and is highly repetitive in nature. But it’s extremely effective and doesn’t take much to do, so you want to make sure you spend time on it. Setup a target/goal of how many links you want to build in order to maintain your motivation as you go along. For example, if your goal is to get back 1,000 links, then go after it and don’t put on the breaks until you reach your target. Just keep moving forward and don’t stop, and soon you’ll have a hundreds of links coming back to your blog, helping you rank better.
2. Make a List of All those Blogs that You Want a Link From
It’s always important to keep your focus on blogs and sites that are relevant to your target market, that’s what we’ve always been told right? However, you shouldn’t ignore other blogs as well, the ones that are in no way related to your niche. Many of the old link building strategies won’t apply these days. Google keeps changing its algorithm, which basically means that you need to keep up with the Search Engines if you gotta stay ahead in the game. No matter where your links come from (as long as it’s not some place illegal), they count. Also, in the past, you had to have tons of links in order to get ranked on the front page, now the rules have changed and the game is played differently. So the real reason why you would want to have a lot of links for promoting your blog is to make sure you funnel in traffic from as many sources as possible. However, at the same time, you can’t ignore getting links from blogs within your niche, because if someone’s interested in Martial Arts and your blog teaches Martial Arts, then obviously it makes sense to have your link posted on various other Martial Arts related sites.
3. Get Links from High Google PR blogs
It’s as simple as, the higher page rank a site has, the better it is to have a link from. One of the best tactics is to try and get a link back from sites that have got pages that rank higher than your own. Most of the times, this seems to be the hardest aspect of building one way links. Many of the high Page Rank sites don’t offer much to small blogs/sites. What’s more, as they grow bigger, they even turn off the “follow comments” part of their website. It’s almost like, they’ve become too good in their respective niche and therefore moved one notch up. Since linking to high PR sites can do wonders for your link building campaign, it should be a priority on your list. You don’t always have to go for high PR sites in your niche, getting a high quality PR link from the big boys like PR8 Yahoo Answers and PR 8 Digg.com without much pain. There are many such reputed sites that hand over immediate follow links to you in a platter, you just need to look around a bit and not get trapped only in sites within your niche.
4. Maintain a List to Follow Up
Create a list in either word or excel of all the blogs/sites that you’ve attempted to link to. In about a week’s time, check back with them and see if you’ve been added. In case they haven’t, follow up with them through email and ask them to link to you again. When trying to get good links back to your blog, you need patience and persistence because not everyone you try to link to will do so in the first go. There will be possibilities of your first email being lost in many mails or it could have ended up in the junk folder. A follow up email pays off many times when the first one fails. Nothing happens in a day, so keep on moving from blog to blog, even if some of them snub you. Keep moving.
5. Lay Down a Schedule for Your Link Building Campaign
Setting up a schedule for your link building makes a lot of sense as it will get things organized and make your job easier. For example, if you choose to do it for an hour a day at a specific time, and then make sure you stick to your schedule – you’ll achieve your goal within no time. The urge to get like a 1,000 – 2,000 links in one single month is something you need to avoid. The best way is to take it slow and smooth, and keep it natural. If you get 200 links in a single day, that would put you on Google’s spam radar and you might get penalized for it. So play safe and rank well.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I really apreciate the new perspective for link building campaigns!
I hope you don’t mind inserting some techy stuff on the matter:)
1. First, if you’re building one way backlinks naturally you can’t posibly build to much backlinks in a short period of time. Red flags are raised for Google only when automation is employed.
2. Paid backlinks can be productive as long as they’re not spotted by Search Engines; if you consider paying for a one way back link, make sure to negociate its placement – request the anchor text to be placed within a topic related piece of content; this tactic doesn’t fail.
3. As you well pointed out, getting a backlink from high PageRank sites is very difficult; the best approach is to build your PR little by little and advance in targeting higher PR websites (to getting a link from) as your own site grows in PR.
4. Offering your services such as guest posting, article oublishing, interviewing your potential link host are keys to be granted a backlink.
Hope these short points will help your SEO efforts. When building link Be Persistent.
Talk soon!
Cheers,
Cristian
Very informative article. Link building is one of the techniques in seo that needs to be mastered, along with keyword choice and content writing. A competitive link building will definitely produce great result for a website.
seems like even the commentors are here for link building ..lol
Hi Parvez,
Thanks for stopping by. We welcome all relevant comments here
Cheers,
Bryan
Great article! Thanks!