Link Building is a blogging administration task, that is necessary, for building your site up in the search rankings. Essentially, building links, or link building, means, having a direct line from another site, directly back to your main blog page, or another page on your site. (sort of like a portal, for users and search engines, to travel along. Links take you directly to where the anchor text says, and this cuts out having to search, with a search engine.)
Anchor text, is the words used, that are underlined, and in another color to the ordinary text on the page. The anchor text is what is seen by the reader of the page, the link is written in HTML, and is invisible to the reader. It looks like the URL to the page, that you can see up in the address bar. To link to the main page of RHB would look like this to you, in HTML to the search engines it looks like http://routinehabit.com/blog.
The more links pointing to a page, the better the page looks, in the eyes of the search engines. The search engines, are the ones that rank the pages, in the results pages.
As an example, for a keyword term, that someone types into Yahoo, like Link Building, the results will come up next for the keyword term Link Building. Among other things, Yahoo would decide, which sites to rank for those sites with the keyword Link Building in their pages, based on particular pages, that have lot’s of links back to the keyword “Link Building”. The search engines also take into consideration, the page rank of the site, that is linking to the other site. Meaning that not all links are of the same value. A link from a pr8 site is worth more than a link from a pr4 site, and a pr3 site more than a pr1 site.
How do you get links?
There are many ways to get links. They come from other sites in your niche, making reference to an article that you may have written. They come from social networks, directories, anywhere, that there is text written, links may be used. The idea then is to get as many links as you are able to. And good links at that. One of the most common ways that competitive people go about, trying to get ahead of others for their main keywords, is to use directories, that tell you what other peoples keywords are, and what links they have on their sites.
Research competitors
Lots of webmasters spend a lot of their time finding links by looking through their competitor’s link profiles. Essentially, you’re piggy backing off of their success. While some links are unobtainable (i.e. a random mention in a news post), others can be diamonds in the rough (a high quality niche directory).
I suggest using SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer for this. Plugin your competitors and export their back-links to a CSV. Do this for all of your competitors so you can get all of their links in one place – Excel. Then you can sort them by various link metrics to find the best opportunities.
Submit your blog to blog directories
A major advantage that blogs have over websites, is that they are able to submit to tons of various blog and RSS directories. On submitting the directories list either your blogs URL, your blogs most current post, or both. If your looking for a comprehensive list of these directories, check out the list at TopRank.
It’s a time consuming job submitting to all the directories, so to make a start, put Alltop and Technotati on the top of your list. The others you can join as you get the time.
Social network and forum profile Updates
All bloggers are involved in an array of social media networks, social bookmarking sites and forums. It’s important to make certain that your profiles are up to date on all of these and that you have a link back to your blog from your profiles.
To get the most out of these sites, make sure to have your profiles displaying your picture, and containing great info on you. It’s also important to contribute valuable information, so that more people will want to get to know more about you by visiting your blog.
With forums, make sure that you also have a link to your blog and up to date profile. Some forums allow links in your signature, so make certain to add one there too. Forums are a good place to meet people with common interests to you. It’s best to sit back for a little while, get a feel for the forum, before you go posting too much about your own blog. If you can find out who the most active and influential people are in the forum, and strategically start a relationship with them, lot’s of awesome traffic, would be certain to follow. Like forming any relationship, this takes time, so be careful not to come across rude or pushy.
Being a guest blogger
Increased traffic generation and links that count for search rankings, are what you can look forward to by guest blogging.
To find places to submit your guest posts too, try typing these terms, plus your niche keywords into Google: submit guest post, guest post guidelines, guest author guidelines.
My Blog Guest is a community you can join, that tracks lots of guest posting opportunities.
Lists like the 202+ High Quality Internet Marketing PR3 – PR8 Blogs That Accept Guest Posts. Are awesome places to find great sites that accept guest bloggers.
Using Web 2.0 Properties
Leo Dimilo a Hub Page Writer suggests “Another popular strategy is to use multiple web2.0 properties to bolster a single property. Example: If I was build an infobarrel page, a squidoo page and a weebly or wetpaint page and then point those pages to this page (her hub, hubpages SEO) with the anchor text SEO for hubpages, I could rank for that keyword provided of course, the keyword wasn’t that competitive.”
Blog Challenge Day 54
Now you know everything there really is to link building. For our blogging while angels sleep challenge day 54, find the top 3 sites in your niche, and using the SEOmoz open site explorer, find their top 3 links, that would be also accessible to you. That means, the links need to come from a directory or a forum. Somewhere that you would also be able to obtain the same links, and get them for yourself. In that case your looking for PR8 links.
This would give you 9 new pr8 links on your site. Certain to lift your site up in the rankings, for your targeted keyword. Make sure to choose one of your most targeted keywords, and to use the same keyword for all 9.
Comments
If you have any questions about our 90 posts in 90 days challenge, feel free to ask in the comments. Have I missed any other awesome ways to build links? If you know of any, please be sure to leave us a comment below.
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As always, thanks for reading,
by: Sharon Thoms
