Backlinks are the building blocks of your search engine ranking.
[This is part of the The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series.]
A natural follow-up to yesterday’s blog post about backlinks and your blog’s link profile is how one goes about growing it effectively.
Although there are a near-infinite amount of possibilities when it comes to creating more backlinks but they typically fall into three distinct strategies that when employed well and wisely can provide a significant increase to your search engine ranking.
Ready to grow your blog through backlinks? Here you go:
1. Organic Growth
This strategy is actually a result of amazing blog content, plain and simple. Backlinks are earned because your blog continues to pump out killer content day after day after day and people find your content worth mentioning and worth blogging about.
There is no practical or actionable element required by the search engine optimizer other than creating that content and making sure it’s easily visible – having the right WordPress Theme, WordPress Plugins, and other design-related elements can hep this endeavor greatly as well.
2. Manual Submission and Solicitation
The second way that search engine optimizers create new backlinks for their clients or for their own personal sites and blog is by simply soliciting other sites to create backlinks. They can do this in the following ways:
- Submit to automated directories (or curated site directories) like DMOZ and many others.
- Emailing site owners or contente creators and asking for backlinks.
- Paying for listings.
This manual process can be time consuming but could payoff in big ways if done well. Getting your blog and/or website listed in some of the top directories and from high ranking and trusted properties will increase your rank and move you up closer to the top of any SERP.
3. User Generated
The third way that search engine optimizers and strategic bloggers can create more backlinks is by harnessing the power of user generated content – that is, using guestbooks, forum signatures, social sharing websites, blog comments, site user profiles, question and answer forums, public and open group discussions (a’la Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, etc), directories, and other such tools, widgets, and more to create as many backlinks as possible.
Remember, though, that the more natural these actions appear the better it is for you and for search engines to use them appropriately as you don’t want to bee seen as spammy.
It’s also good to note that the best search engine optimizers look for the rel=nofollow attribute in these user generated sites to see if value such as PageRank can flow easily.
[This is part of the The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series.]
Are links in section 3 ever actually worthwhile though? Surely they are normally nofollow and have no search engine value?
The current thinking is that they don’t boost your rankings. But it’s certainly possible that search engines look at the proportion of nofollowed and followed backlinks to your site, to make sure you’re not a spammer.
For example, if I’m a search engine, and I see a new site that has tons of followed backlinks from high-trust sites, and no “nofollowed” links, I would be suspicious — did the new site pay for backlinks? Are they being spammy? Are they not taking part in social media conversations about their topic?
Just a suspicion on my part, definitely nothing I can prove. While I don’t spend tons of time trying to get nofollowed backlinks, I don’t ignore them either.
Interesting thoughts Melanie, certainly makes sense!
not all have nofollow though. so i consider them of value.
Fantastic post.
Not sure whether you’d put this under category 1 or 2, but don’t forget about guest posting! I’ve had some success (even on this blog
with guest posting and getting some great backlinks.
Of course it’s more labor-intensive a process than just asking for a link, but often it will bring with it some good traffic.
As for category 3, not only does commenting on other sites have the potential for SEO value (depending on whether they implement rel=nofollow, which they almost always do), but it can introduce you to new readers. I get a reasonable amount of traffic from those types of comments.
And then there are the sites that don’t use nofollow. I really like to comment on those! They tend to be few and far between. They also may have older content management systems, which while they present usability challenges to the user, may also indicate the site’s age and trust level from the search engines (a plus).
Hope that all makes sense… I have a lot of thoughts. I need to write a post on this myself, I think!
melanie,
this comment is awesome and definitely agree with your points here. commenting is of value in any way you see it.
These are some great suggestions. I always go back to having good content and user generated links. Social networking goes a long way when trying to generate blog traffic.
this is for sure!
Good stuff John. Filled in my follow up thoughts from yesterday’s post!
sure thing justin!
Thank you for the post! I’m searching for tips to improve my blog.
ok. sure thing.
Appreciate this post. As a website that’s been around for quite some time we’re still trying to get a handle on DYI optimization. We’re learning! But the process is slow. We’ve not done any of the 3 well at all. Thanks for mapping out how to go about increasing links.
Really good tips. And it’s interesting to hear people’s thoughts on nofollows.
Great post. I’m having trouble getting DMOZ to accept my blog. Any help please?