If the benchmark for Organic Search success is ROI, the process to achieve this goal begins with a sound link building strategy. When it comes to link building, it pays to be popular. Link popularity measures the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. With link building, relevancy directly correlates to rankings. The more relevant incoming links your site receives, the greater the chances of your site ranking high on major search engines.
Incoming links are an extremely valuable part of link popularity and link building. Incoming links bring considerable amounts of traffic to your site. Linking to third party sites increase user visit potential. Their effectiveness is contingent on strategy. It is important to develop direct and indirect incoming link sources to establish search integrity and maximize relevance.
Direct Linking
Effective link building is a continuous process. Success does not come overnight. When it does, it’s generated from careful evaluation. Three important factors go into effective direct linking:
- Quantity – Total incoming links directed to a site or webpage
- Relevancy – Degree to which the incoming links relate to your site
- Strength – The amount of authority the site providing the link has
Adhering to these factors will positively impact your organic search position. Proper research is key. You are likely to find sound linking partners within your network. Sites with high ranking relevant search terms, keywords and themes will benefit your link building strategy. Don’t forget your manners. Create personalized direct link requests when seeking incoming link partnerships.
Indirect Linking
Indirect linking is a more natural approach to incoming link acquisition. It relies on content to draw sites to your site. But as is the case with direct linking, indirect linking best practices should be implemented for link building and Organic Search success.
- Make Your Site Linkworthy – Add educational and instructional content; include case studies, blogs, press releases and white papers
- Submit to Directories – DMOZ, specialized directories. It’s about relevancy.
- Market Your Memberships – Promote industry affiliations, contacts and connections
- Freshen Your Content – Increase your site’s visibility and attractiveness
Formulating a strategic link building plan requires expertise. A novice approach can raise warning flags across search space adversely affecting your rankings and reputation. Remember – link popularity measures quantity and quality. Therefore, it makes sense to avoid link popularity farms, linking to your own site, linking to sites that house hundreds of links on a single page, unknown link solicitations and bulk list submissions. And as always, think before you link.
Actually don’t call it a comeback. Blogs have been here for years. But they kind of got lost in the social media shuffle. Companies and individuals have been burning the midnight oil trying to drive the best possible results through their social channels nearly forgetting what a valuable resource a blog is.
A few weeks back, I wrote about the social and affiliate benefits of blogging. Today, I want you to think of your blog as your number one growth asset. It is one part branding tool and one part thought leadership vessel enabling you to showcase what you do and your unique authoritative point of view on relevant topics. By posting a regular blog chock full of compelling, engaging information, you will be building your brand and attracting links to your site from within without relying on external advertising. If you doubt the effect of blogging, chew on this little nugget:
85% of web pages have less than 7 incoming links
That means a blog that generates a few inbound links puts your website, blog, social presence and business 85% ahead of the competition in terms of awareness and potential revenue. Not too shabby. So after you are finished reading this blog, do some blogging of your own. It may not be a comeback but the right blog will keep readers and prospective customers coming back time and time again.
SEO is a long term investment for driving traffic and ROI growth. Achieving these goals begins with sound link building. Leveraging link building expertise is essential for implementing advanced link baiting techniques, navigating aggressive markets, and ensuring your backlinks are healthy and compliant. This strategy can optimize your link building into link branding.
Link baiting increases your backlinks or incoming links, drives more traffic to your site and improves brand awareness through content creation. The latter of these benefits is rapidly becoming most important when you consider the power of social media and the influence a user opinion has on brand value. Link building experts understand quality trumps quantity. Effective baiting utilizes relevant, engaging, high-quality content that social media users will endorse. When done correctly, link baiting delivers more organic links, improves SERPs rankings, increases traffic to your site and enhances its visibility.
If SEO marketers had their own cheerleading squad, the captain might lead the team with the following cheer: “Be Aggressive… But Not Too Aggressive.” Link builders need to be able to approach the organic landscape from a marketing perspective. They need to recognize opportunities to build link popularity and search rankings that don’t set off red flags.
Healthy backlinks are happy backlinks. The more relevant backlinks your site receives, the more likely it is that it will rank highly on the SERPs. Continuously monitoring your backlinks to ensure relevance and domain authority is important for generating positive rankings. This brings to mind another cheer the SEO cheerleading captain should lead – “Be Proactive!” By building your own backlinks, you will create an organic roadmap to drive relevant, authoritative traffic to your site.
Readers, we are excited to announce the arrival of Post Level Text Link Ads! Post Level TLA’s offer many features that our advertisers are looking for including:
- The ability to target highly specific popular blog posts.
- Maximum of one ad below the post.
- Have a full 80 character title and 150 letter description.
- Be positioned directly at the end of top posts making it ideal for click throughs.
- Each ad will be on a single page only.
Check out this page for more information and to browse our marketplace of Post Level TLA’s!
Are you trying the increase the popularity of your blog, but you have already tried all of the conventional methods? MyBlogLog is a great service that you can use to increase your traffic.
Here’s how in 3 simple steps:
- Create a profile that contains your information as well as your blog’s information. You want to be as detailed as possible and make sure you fill in your contact information because you want to welcome an open channel for communication.
- Next, you want to search MyBlogLog for competitor blogs or other blogs that may have your ideal reader base. Once you find a good amount of them create a list for your own record.
- Once you have a list of blogs that may contain your ideal readers then you want friend MyBlogLog users that are subscribed to those blogs and could also potentially benefit from your blog. The key to this is not the spam those users, but instead just friend them because a good portion of them will friend you back and visit your blog which should increase your traffic and readership.
Leveraging social communities can be an easy and effective way to increase your traffic and readership. Just be careful when leveraging them because the last thing you want is for people to accuse you of spamming.
There are many ways to increase a sites ranking such as purchasing text links, but it seems that people are forgetting the basics. Before you purchase text links I would make sure you have optimized your website for the search engines. Here are the most common mistakes that I see:
- Meta Description – Although meta tags don’t seem important you would be surprised at how much a unique meta description tag on each page of a website can do to your rankings. You can try stuffing them with keywords to see if it helps, but I recommend tailoring each description to accurately represent the content on each page.
- Sitemap – You want to make sure that your web pages are getting indexed by the search engines. If your content does not get indexed how do you expect the search engines to rank it? Using a simple sitemap structure can work well for you if you have a small to medium sized website.
- Robots.txt – Most people think that the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receive. In many cases this is not true; by removing duplicate content from the search engines you can actually increase your traffic.
- URL strings – A lot of people use content management systems which make their URLs look all funny with extraneous characters. Clean up your URLs, the difference is like night and day.
- Code – By using clean and compliant code you can keep your website search engine friendly. You can use basic code elements such as headings or alt tags to help improve your rankings.
There is nothing wrong with purchasing text links, but before you do, I recommend you cover the basics. If you do not do the basics then you will not be getting the most from the text links you purchase.
Ever since blogging has gained in popularity people have debated about the optimal number of posts you should be posting. There are those that say if you post too little you will lose your readers and those that say if you post too much you will overwhelm them and also lose your readers. Is there a magic number of posts you should be writing everyday?
I have a completely different take on it, and I’m not necessarily saying I’m right because there are so many factors for a blogger to consider. But the way I see it is that the most important thing is that you’re consistent. I believe that once you set the expectations for your readers, you need to be consistent.
If your blog readers are used to you only posting once a week then I don’t think you will lose any subscribers by not blogging enough. On the other hand if you write five blog posts per day and then all of the sudden cut back to a couple posts per week it is more likely that you will start to lose your audience.
So instead of worrying about finding the magic number of posts to write just be consistent and give your readers what they have grown to expect.
Michael Gray from Wolf Howl had an interesting post about what time of day do you post to your blog. One thing that I like to keep in mind when posting is that readers probably have hundreds of options in their feed reader, but the amount of blog posts in their reader decreases over weekends drastically. So if you start posting on the weekends, there is a good chance that you will start gaining new readers because when they can’t find anything else that’s interesting to read they will at least be able to read your blog post.
Keep your posting schedule the same for a few weeks but also start posting on the weekends. Do this for a month and you should see good growth from it.
Darren Rowse from ProBlogger posted a great list of 34 reasons why people unsubscribe from your blog. Darren asked his readers their thoughts on why they unsubscribe from blogs, over 109 people commented and Darren classified all the responses and posted the data.
There are definitely some really interesting reasons why people will unsubscribe from a blog. If you’re a blogger, I would consider reading this post and then reading it again to make sure that you’re not losing your audience for any of these reasons.
We all spend so much effort building an audience that it’s critical we lose as few readers as possible. Similar to the business saying where it’s cheaper to keep existing customers rather than finding new ones.
A few days ago I wrote How to Build Trusted Links, which caused a few people to email me about purchasing .edu links. There are a lot of companies that sell .edu links, but most of the links will be on student blogs and not the actual university website. Although this can still build trust, search engines are quite complex and can probably tell the difference between .edu links from student blogs and links from the actual university website. So before you purchase links from .edu sites make sure you know what pages they are going to be placed on because ones from the actual university site will probably create more trust.
