Increase traffic with links

Content is king when it comes to search engine rankings and credibility, which in turn leads to higher page rankings and exponential traffic to your blog. If you blog for fun and don’t care much for these things then no need to read any further, but if you’re up to working a little bit to generate more traffic to your blog, then you need to know, linking is content’s queen.

Getting good quality websites to link to your blog will help increase traffic and build-in sustainability. The key here is that linking the correct way requires patience, persistence and a little work but pays big dividends, while shortcuts, which may pay-off in the short term, often come back to bite you in the ass later — trust me on this one.

Good and bad linking strategies

Good: Submitting your blog to search engines. This seems like a no-brainer I know, and even if you skip this step the search engines will eventually find you. The key here is getting listed as quickly as possible. One other thing, when it comes to search engines, only worry about the Big 3 (Google, Bing and Yahoo), with Google being the one you should try pleasing the most.

Good: Submitting your blog to directories, especially genre or category specific directories. If I write a sports blog, it makes sense to get listed in quality sports directories, but if I write a sex blog it doesn’t make sense to submit my blog to an educational directory. Don’t pay (see below).

Good: Seek out links within articles from content heavy informational websites. Send an e-mail to these sites to see if they will publish a link back to you within their article, or at the bottom of their article, like a related story link (see recommendation below).

Good: Create linkable content. Write original content and make sure people know about your content through Twitter and/or Facebook. Linkable content is the foundation of your blog, so create original content and let others know.

Good: If you’ve got a product to sell make sure product member associations have a link to your blog.

Bad: Paying for links in directories or link farms is bad, with one exception: the Yahoo Directory. Otherwise, do not pay for links ever!

Bad:Exchanging reciprocal blog roll links with blogs that aren’t beneficial to your site’s visitors. I’ve fallen victim to this trap in the past, and while it brings visitors to your blog initially, eventually search engines will view this as manipulation and penalize you for link exchanging with sites that aren’t relevant to your niche.

Note: as part of a blogging community, like OutLoudBlogs.com, link building within the community may be interpreted as an attempt to manipulate rankings by search engines. That’s not to say we shouldn’t link amongst each other, but if I have an entertainment blog and I link to a fellow OutLoudBlogger who writes exclusively about relationships, we’re actually hurting each other.

Recommendation:

1 – Make sure your blog is submitted to and listed in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
2 – Write good relevant content while becoming active and forging relationships within the blogging community.
3 – Within your posts, link to blogs/websites with whom you’ve cultivated a relationship, and ask them if they would do the same for you, but don’t sacrifice your content just to include a link.
For example: If I write a sports blog (I really do) and a fellow blogger writes a post with similar content, we should be able to find ways to link to each other within our content.
4 – Keep your blog roll links to a minimum. I’m not sure what the right amount is here, and anyone who tells you they know is lying for sure, so following step #3 is a much better way of linking back and forth.