How To Build Backlinks To Your Blog

Do you want to improve your blog’s search engine ranking so that Google and Co send you more traffic?

Unless you’re blogging purely for personal reflection or you want your mum to stay your only reader I’m pretty sure you’ll be up for more traffic and building backlinks is a great tactic to achieve just that.

You might remember yesterday’s post focused on what backlinks are and how to find out who is linking to which blogs.

Well today I want to share six awesome strategies to build backlinks so your blog jumps up the list.

Let’s get started.

Guest Posting

Exposure to new audiences is a huge motivator for bloggers to guest post. The host blog’s audience reads or watches your content, loves it (hopefully) and clicks on the link in your biography to find out more.

What many bloggers forget is that your guest blogger biography creates an incoming link to your site. The key to success is to guest post on sites regularly updated with quality content to ensure the search engines value the link.

If you are new to guest posting or need some help getting your submissions accepted check out ‘9 Ridiculous Reasons Your Guest Post Submission Failed (And 3 That Weren’t Your Fault).’

Commenting On Other Blogs

Commenting on other blogs is a great strategy for building backlinks as well as a fantastic excuse to read awesome content.

Be smart with your time though especially if you are blogging as a business model or to support your existing business. If you are you will need to consider return on investment and to focus your comments on the larger blogs in your niche.

That said don’t forget the little and same sized guys. You never know which blog will be the next blog to blast ahead of the pack.

Interview A Leader In Your Niche

Have you been interviewed for someone’s blog? Once it was published what were the first things you did? Did it involve thanking your host in the comments, sharing a link to the post on your blog and promoting it around the interwebs? Of course it did.

When a blogger chooses to interview you on their blog you should be flattered. Generally speaking, interviews are a sign that the blogger respects your knowledge and wants to share you with their audience.

How can this help your backlinking efforts? Choose a leader in your niche to interview and the quality of the backlinks will be greater. We all love a little flattery so what better incentive for a leader to link back to your blog. It’s a win-win opportunity.

Share Your Posts On Social Platforms

Make sure you regularly promote your posts to social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Search engines such as Google and Bing consider links from these sites as a sign of quality given you are unlikely to be spamming your friends and followers. A few retweets and shares from these folks won’t hurt your cause either.

John Dohery of Distilled NYC experimented heavily to test the impact of tweets on search engine rankings and came up with the following conclusions:

1. Always post the link on Twitter when you publish a new article.
2. If possible, have 2-3 or more people who will always tweet your links. Since my findings show that the number of tweets may positively affect rankings, the more tweets you have guaranteed, the better chance your article will have of ranking, even for only a short period of time.
3. To bump an established link up in rankings, it seems necessary that the tweet come from a well-respected, influential, and relevant Twitter account.

Read John’s full article ‘The Tweet Affect: How Twitter Affects Rankings’ to learn more about the experiments.

Article Marketing

Submitting your content to articles directories such as EzineArticles.com, IdeaMartketers.com and Buzzle.com helps bring visitors to your site and rank you in search results. You have to be smart though for it to be effective.

Things to remember are:

• Do your keyword research.
• Use headings to highlight your keyword.
• Capture attention with your heading.
• Have a great call to action with a link back to your site in the biography box.

Create Awesome Content

What is awesome content? The answer is different for every blog because each has its own unique audience. The key is to know what your audience loves then create it for them. As Corbett Barr of Think Traffic says ‘Write things that make people think. Inspire people. Change lives. Create value. Blow people away with your usefulness.’

Got that covered? Excellent.

Now for god sake, make your awesome content easily shareable. Add social sharing buttons in obvious places. Don’t make your reader search for them. Ask your readers to share your content if they loved it – we are all busy and sometimes we forget.

A Backlinks Warning

I know I promised six backlinking strategies but after all the gorgeous comments and support from you yesterday I wanted to give a little more.

Here is your warning…Don’t build links like a crazy person. Link building is a long term strategy. Don’t suddenly build hundreds or thousands of links to your blog and not expect to be penalised by the search engines. If it seems spammy or unnatural the search engines won’t love you for it.

So there you have it. Six backlinking strategies and a warning.

Are you a little surprised? I bet many of you were already following some of the strategies without realising the backlinking benefits.

So why not stretch your efforts a bit further? Tell me in the comments which strategy you are going to implement next then get started.

 

 

Pic Source: 1. MichaelMcD 2. iStockPhoto 3. Brantley Davidson 4. iStockPhoto