Early Stage Strategy: Building Links
Incoming links are important for a blog. Most importantly because they drive visitors to your site, and visitors are of first and foremost importance to a blog. But besides bringing visitors, incoming links are the most important factor for getting a ranking in search engines. Search engines determine the importance of a site on many factors, but incoming links are one of the most important factors.
In this article I’m going to discuss tactics to get incoming links.
1. Get connected with others
The best way to get links, quality links, is by connecting to other bloggers and build friendships. The most powerful link to your blog is one that’s coming from a real person, endorsing your content.
There’s nothing that beats it in both quality of links and quality of new visitors. Get networking on twitter, by leaving comments and sending the odd email. Don’t spam! Everybody hates spammers!
2. Participate in blog carnivals
Blog carnivals are blogging events where one blog hosts a carnival and links to articles on other blogs that cover a similar topic. You can find an overview of all active carnivals at the Blog Carnival homepage. You need to register for a free account and you can submit your articles from that site. For almost every topic there are carnivals to be found.
My experience is that the volatility of active carnivals is quite high. Carnivals are started and discontinued all the time, some are pretty high quality where the hosting blogger really digs into the articles (expect visitors) and some are simply link farms that get hosted on seperate blog carnival blogs (expect nothing).
It takes quite some time to really sort through the carnivals and can be annoying as the user interface is not that great. But it will get you links that get picked up by the search engines and Technorati.
3. Host a blog carnival
Besides participating you can also choose to host a blog carnival. While incoming links are not guaranteed, other blogs will link back to the carnival. The more effort you put into the carnival, the more likely others are to link back to it. And if they do so, leaving a comment thanking them for the link back and a remark about the submitted article makes sure that your name gets remembered by the blogger in question. And it also increases the likelihood of readers to click through.
Sign up at the Blog Carnival homepage.
4. Blog directories
There are a lot of blog directories on the net. A lot of the blog directories are simply link farms, that don’t have a lot of traffic because hardly anyone uses them. And other directories are pretty valuable, check this list to see 20 of the more valuable blog directories to be listed in.
There are basically three types of links that you can get from blog directories:
- Free links
Free links are just that, free. It usually takes a very long time before your blog gets approved for these links. - Reciprocal links
Some blog directories require that you link back to them, when they take your link in the directory for free. Choose carefully whether and with whom you want to do this. Linking out to blacklisted sites is not appreciated by search engines and they can take your blog out of the search results if they find those links. - Paid links
This the kind of link that simply costs you money. Almost all the directories have them in one form or another. Again be careful about with whom you want to do business.
5. Signatures
If you use forums you know that there is often the possibility to use signatures when you post topics or replies. You can put a link back to your blog in the signature, notifying readers of these topics that they can find more about you there.
Not all forums treat these links as standard links, but add the rel=nofollow attribute to them. This means that they are not counted as incoming links by search engines. But there are a lot of forums that don’t do this.
6. Comments
One of the other ways to get links to your site is by leaving comments. This will get you exposure on other blogs, especially if you leave valuable and insightful comments. You’ll get a link that will send visitors. Not vast quantities, but a handful every week or every day if you’re exceptionally valuable. The early positions in a comment thread send more visitors than the other positions, so being one of the first to comment counts.
Like in the forum signatures, they’re hardly all links that are counted as such by search engines, but there are blogs that remove the nofollow link from their comments to encourage more comments. Don’t fall in the pitfall of leaving very short comments only to gather links. Most of these bloggers will simply delete the links from people who do just that. They will reward only people who genuinely contribute to their blog.
Pitfalls
Using social bookmarking and social media sites like del.icio.us, simpy, stumbleupon, digg, propeller and sphinn is very helpful in getting more links, visitors and visibility. These sites are pretty keen on preventing people from spamming their sites, so they take measures to discourage people from submitting links just to get incoming links. Obviously there is a link to your blog on these sites as soon as you or someone else submits it, but they will prevent search engines from counting it as a real link, by adding the rel=nofollow attribute to the link.
Using semi-automated bookmarking services like Onlywire is not helping at all. For some sites that is even a red flag that could lead to a ban on links to your site for all of their members.
Final thought
The most valuable incoming link is a link initiated by someone else, because they value what you write. These tips are to help your rankings a little in the early stages, they are pretty useless as soon as your blog gets some momentum. But whatever you do, don’t spam blogs, forums, social media sites or whomever to splash your links over the internet! People will notice and in time search engines and advertisers will notice too. And turn their back on you.
There are many more tactics to getting incoming links, but for the early stages working with these will keep you busy for now.
2 Pennies' Worth Of Thoughts Here!
A Penny For Your Thoughts:
If you don't put your two cents in, how can you get change?
Thanks for great tips! I didn’t realize the impact of using the signature to promote my blog.
Leifs last blog post..Del.icio.us: Anbefalte lenker for uke 22 - 2008
@Leif: If you’re an active forum user and have built up a reputation, they can be really useful! Especially when you’re active in forums related to your blog.