How To Get Backlinks To Your Blog

Every blogger try his very best to acquire backlinks for his blog in different ways. Links coming from various sources that are relevant to the niche elevates the ranking of your content in SERP's. Although there are so many ways to gather backlinks, I would prefer not to discuss about various less popular and black hat techniques to acquire backlinks. Let's see how can we inflate our backlink count using some very effective techniques.
Comment On Do-Follow Blogs

There are hundreds of do-follow blogs that are a good source of acquiring backlinks for your blog. Create a list of do-follow blogs that are relevant to your niche and religiously comment on these blogs. Do not spam the blog and devote some time in giving useful and constructive comments. Blogs having do-follow links enabled have strict commenting policies, and any spammer is instantly kicked out.


Guest Blogging

I myself use this method to acquire backlinks as well as exposure for my blog. Build relationships with fellow bloggers and submit a guest post for their blogs. Often some bloggers commit a mistake of creating a filler post for the guest post. Remember, its all about your credibility and reputation. If the content is not for your own blog that doesn't mean you can afford to create a filler post. Giving your very best gives you the required traffic and of course a backlink.


Co-Author a Blog

Once you get popular and start to get known in your domain, there are many blog co-authoring opportunities. You can also search on Google about various opportunities of co-authoring a blog. Negotiate a fair deal that is a win-win situation for both the blog owner and you. It will give you exposure, linkbacks and money, all at one time.


Article Marketing

At weekends you can submit couple of articles to various popular article directories like Ezine Articles, GO Articles and Search Warp. Create a resource box and linkback to your blog. Apart from gaining a backlink, article submission also sends some good traffic back to the blog.


Create Linkbait

More and more bloggers try their hand on this technique to get massive number of backlinks in quick time. Having said that, one must keep in mind that its an art and comes by experience. You may or may not succeed in your various attempts of creating viral content. Still, you must try your hand at it and all will follow by experience.


Offer Free eBook or Theme




Create a good ebook or a blog theme (template). Offer it for free to your readers. I myself have used this technique by designing a free blogger template called - Mint-Classic. It is now on several blogspot blogs and the credit link in the footer is adding to the backlinks to my blog. If your giveaway is really good and becomes a hit, you will get a good number of backlinks very easily.


Break Some News






Image Credit: debaird

Create Google Alerts and keep yourself updated with current happenings in your domain. If you manage to break some news on your blog, you can acquire massive backlinks in no time.


Participate In Do-Follow Forums

Like do-follow blogs, there are dozens of do-follow discussion forums that can be a good source of acquiring backlinks. Daily keep an hour aside for these forums, and build up your links by taking active part on a regular basis. Again the forum should be relevant to your blog's niche.


Cross Link Your Blog Network




If you have more than one blog or your blog is a part of a blog network, you can easily cross-link the blogs. Put more stress on contextual linking within posts across each blog in the network to get the maximum benefit. Internal cross-linking on the same blog also increases the backlink count. Make sure you do not do it excessively and pay special attention on the relevancy and anchor text while creating a contextual link, whether its an internal link or a cross-link in the blog network.


Blog Carnivals

Create some good articles containing contextual links to your blog and submit them to blog carnivals. Once a month, I submit couple of articles to blog carnivals that gives me valuable linkbacks and decent traffic.


Create Quality Content

And last but not the least is your blog content. The best way to organically build backlinks to your blog is to create consistent quality content. Piling up massive amount of pillar articles automatically generates backlinks when people quote, refer and discuss about your articles and posts.



Here I must stress that this process takes time and patience, but the returns are equally rewarding. In the long run, these organic links referring your quality content plays a big role in bringing regular traffic to your blog.

5 Best SEO Tips For Bloggers

1. Naming Files Correctly

Choosing a file name that correctly describes the context of the image makes it easy for the indexing bots to categorize it in a better way. Wrong way to name the above image is IMG02056.jpg.

How about ball.jpg?
Hey, that's obvious buddy.

What if we name it blue-ball?
That's better.

And how about plastic-blue-ball?
Hah, that's excellent...

2. Descriptive <alt> Tag

Let's take a look at the HTML code, that we use in embedding the images in blog posts.

i) Bad Approach



<img src=/images/IMAGE02056.jpg"/>


ii) Better Way



<img src=/images/blue-ball.jpg" alt="Blue ball"/>


iii) Best Way



<img src=/images/plastic-blue-ball.jpg" alt="An air filled plastic blue ball"/>


Note the descriptive alt tag, that will help in better categorization of the image while indexing will be done by various search engine bots. This will increase the chances of this image being shown in relevant image search.

Wrapping Contextual Text Around The Image

Make sure you embed the image right in the middle of the related content, with relevant titles and descriptive text. This will further help the bots to better categorize and index the image.


Smart Anchor Text

Linking out to resources and information is an essential ingredient of any blog post. Whether we are linking to any external blog/website or doing cross-linking (internal linking) of posts, choosing a proper anchor text increases the relevance of the content to which it is referring. Proper anchor text helps in achieving better ranking in SERP's and is one of the most important part of on-page optimization process. Here is an example that shows proper implementation of anchor texts.

First take a look at this example with poor anchor text as well as redundant text.



Blogger has introduced a blog exporting feature to easily export a blogger blog with minimum efforts. To know more about it click here.


Now the same paragraph revised with optimized anchor text and stripped redundant text.



Blogger has introduced a new blog exporting feature to easily export a blog with minimum efforts.


In the first example, not only text is redundant, but the phrase that we have selected for the anchor text has no relevance to the post to which it is referring. On the other hand, in the second example we have stripped off the redundant text and have chosen a relevant phrase that accurately define the content of the page to which it is going to refer.


Optimized Permalink Structure

An optimized permalink format helps in boosting the rank of your posts in search results. Blogger does not allow manual modification of permalink structure, but it has fairly good automated permalink generation system.

On the other hand, Wordpress allows you to modify the permalink structure as per your needs. Not only we can create a global permalink structure, but can also edit the permalink at the post level. By default, Wordpress has a cryptic permalink structure such as http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123. Here post id is included in the URL, giving no indication about the content of the post.

The permalink structure should be such that robots can easily identify the content through it. To change your Wordpress blog permalink structure go to 'Settings -> Permalinks' and click the 'Custom Structure' option.

Fill the following structure tag in the text box to create most search engine friendly URL:

/%postname%/

After completing this setting, the permalink structure will be something like http://www.yourblog.com/seo-tips-for-bloggers, which clearly tells the robots about the content that is associated with this URL.


Create XML Sitemap and robots.txt

Create a robot.txt file to prevent robots crawling useless or duplicate content. You can create this file in a simple text editor and saving it as robots.txt.

Here is a typical robots.txt file with some common entries that indicate those paths that should not be crawled by bots.



User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/


After creating this file, upload it at the root of your blog's domain.

Creating a sitemap ensures that robots can easily understand the structure of your blog and can easily crawl the content. There are many online sitemap generation services that can be used to generate the map. Wordpress bloggers can use the Google sitemap generator plugin to automate the sitemap creation process. After this plugin is installed, every time you will edit or post on your blog, this plugin will automatically update the sitemap.

The Beginner's Checklist to Learning SEO

Learn how to build a basic website

Before diving into SEO techniques it is important to know the basics of web development. The following tasks will develop the necessary web development skills needed to become a successful SEO:

Learn how to code a basic website without using a WYSIWYG editor – Don't fear the word code, writing HTML is much easier than you think. If you can make a sandwich with two pieces of bread and put something in the middle, you can write HTML. For help, check out this excellent tutorial. Remember, don't worry about SEO techniques at this point. Focus on learning how to build a website first.

Code a website that contains the following:

All styles with CSS. No Tables!
Homepage has 3 unique paragraphs about you
3 pages total; homepage, contact and portfolio
I have created a sample for you using my information, Danny Dover. Feel free to use it as a guide but don't copy and paste my code or you won't learn anything. You will likely have to scour the internet to learn how to fill some of these requirements. This is useful because it improves your searching skills. (Note: I have purposefully not SEOed my example website. You will see why in a little bit)


Pick You Keywords - Pick keywords that are uncompetitive. This is very important as the words you choose will become the center of your SEO efforts. I recommend using your name. Go to Google and search for yourself. If a small amount of low quality websites show up, use your name as your keywords. If your name is competitive to rank for, find a variation of your name that is easier. Ex. Danny Ben Dover.

Register a domain name and find hosting - This is not nearly as difficult as it sounds. I recommend SuperbHosting or SiteGround as good options. However, there are literally thousands of choices. Use your best judgment, but remember you shouldn't be paying more than $7.00 USD a month and the domain name should be included for free. Your only requirement is that your host can't have immovable ads. These could be crawled by the search engines and ruin your rankings. For your domain name, use your keywords from above. Ex. dannydover.com or dannybendover.com. If your keywords are not available as a domain name, choose different keywords. (Note: In this exercise, the keywords you are optimizing for and your domain name should be the same. Although this is not always the case in the real world, having similar keywords to your domain name makes SEO much easier.)

Upload your website files to your new hosting account - The easiest method is to use FTP to drag and drop your files. See your hosting provider for details.

Sign up for Google Analytics and verify your website – This free tool will allow you to track visitors to your website. Installation instructions are included by Google.

Wait a week and search for your keywords in the big four search engines – I generally use the rank checker tool as a shortcut. It is alright if your website doesn't show up. That is what SEO is for. If you do find your website ranking (even if it is not on the first page), record how it ranks in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask) in a spreadsheet.

Wait two weeks to allow search engines to find your site and for Google Analytics to gather data.


Learn about SEO and apply it to your website

Now for the fun part. Learn basic SEO techniques and apply them to your glorious website. This will allow you to see how SEO can help your website rank.

Read the entire Beginner's Guide to SEO – This is essential to building a strong SEO foundation. I also recommend reading the completed parts of the new Beginner's Guide and Aaron Wall's SEO Overview.

Read all of the Google Search Engine Ranking Factors – These will reinforce what you already know and give a perspective on variation. These factors are based off of the experience of some of the SEO industry's most successful people.

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, verify and read everything – This phenomenal resource will show you how Googlebot sees your website and point out any SEO problems you have on your site. Be sure to familiarize yourself with it. The information it provides is formulated toward Google but applies to all the search engines.

Run your website through the SEOmoz tools – Specifically, I recommend the Term Target Tool and Page Strength Tool. These tools will point out areas where you can improve your website.

Add a robots.txt file and a sitemap - Although these are not really necessary for such a small site, familiarizing yourself with these files will be indispensable.

Apply your knowledge – Optimize your Title Tags, Anchor Text, HTML structure (H1, H2), and keyword usage. This is the bread and butter of onsite search engine optimization.

Link build – Add a link to your website on all of your favorite social media/networking sites. Feel free to try your luck with linkbait, although for a site with no competition this isn't really necessary.

Track your site on Yahoo! Site Explorer – Wait a week or two for Yahoo to find your links and then check to see what links are being counted. Be sure to select "inlinks except from this domain to entire site." The links should be displayed roughly in order of importance


Check Google Analytics – By this time you should see more interesting data from your analytics tool. Use this data to learn the basics of analytics and use it as a reference point while link building.

Update your spreadsheet – Search for your website in the big four search engines again and look to see where it ranks. Record these in your spreadsheet. Tracking your data lets you see what techniques are working what techniques are not worth your time.

Test your own SEO theories and record the results - This is not really a task you can ever complete. 90% of all SEO information is already freely available if you can find it. Testing your own theories and getting good results will help you uncover the remaining 10% necessary to out perform your competition.