If you have a blog or other website that you want people to visit, it can be tough getting more visitors and traffic to your site. However, there are things you can do to promote your website and to get more traffic. One way to go about getting more traffic is through backlinks.
What are backlinks? They are a facet of search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is a practice meant to help your website show up in search results. If someone enters a search term related to your website, you can show up in the results if you have solid SEO in place. SEO generally entails two facets: on-page and backlinks. On-page SEO just means that your website is formatted so that search engine crawlers can find your page and categorize it so that it will be found in related search results.
Backlinks are the other facet of SEO, and getting a lot of quality inbound links can really help your website in showing up in search results. Google and the other search engines constantly crawl all over the internet, and when they see a lot of links pointing back to your site, they are more likely to include your website when someone searches for something related.
So it's a good idea to try to get a lot of backlinks pointing back to your website. However, that is easier said than done. In a moment, I'll provide a list of methods I use to get backlinks to my websites.
Before I get there, there's one educational item I want to cover. When we're talking about backlinks, there are two kinds: "nofollow" and "dofollow." These are HTML tags that let the search engines know whether to accept or ignore a link to your site. A nofollow tag means that the search engines will not consider the link as a valid inbound link for determining your rank for search results. Blog comments, for example, are usually nofollow; otherwise, there would be even more comment spam than there is now as more people would try to get backlinks. Normal links are usually dofollow. These dofollow links are great, and the more you can get pointing back to your site, the higher you will be in search results and the more traffic you can get.
So how do you know if a link is nofollow or dofollow? I use a Firefox extension called NoDoFollow. When you turn it on, it color-codes the links you see on a page. Red links are nofollow, and blue links are dofollow. When you find a new site where you could potentially put a link back to your site, it's great to be able to know whether it's worth the time or not just by using this simple extension. You can find this extension and install it by Googling NoDoFollow.
Now, let's get to the good stuff. Here are the methods I use to get backlinks.
One: link exchange. If you run a blog, then a great way to get links back to your site is to exchange links with similar blogs. Typically, if you find a blog similar to yours, you can add a link to it in your blogroll, and then contact the blog owner via email or Twitter and ask them to return the favor. In my experience, most people are willing to exchange links because they also get a link out of it. But be careful about asking the big, popular blogs; they probably get a ton of requests like this, and will probably not be willing to exchange links with a new or small blog with a limited following. It probably doesn't hurt to ask, though.
Two: blog comments. This means finding blogs that post about subjects related to your website, and then commenting on their posts. When you post a comment, you can enter your name and the URL for your website. If you can be one of the first five comments, you're more likely to get some traffic from the comment, particularly if you're posting comments on a popular blog. At the same time, most blog comments are nofollow and won't help your search ranking. So why take the time to do this? I find that it's still a valid way to get some (but not a ton) of people to your site. These visitors are probably interested in your site, and some of them may turn into regular readers or RSS subscribers.
To make blog commenting easier, I set up a Google alert on a subject related to my website. Every day, I get an email listing new blog posts that mention the subject. I can click through the list and post a comment on each blog post, and I get some visitors to my site. Pretty simply.
Three: forums and similar sites. Forums can be a good way to get some links back to your site. In the best case, you're tapping into a community that is interested in what your site is about, and you can get some quality backlinks to increase your traffic as well. Some forums allow you to create a profile where you can post your website URL, and there's a link right there. Some forums also allow you to post a link to your site in your "signature," which gets tacked on to every post you create in the forum. This can create a large number of links back to your site.
However, before taking the time to register for a forum and start participating in the conversation, I would find out whether the links from the profile or the signature are dofollow or nofollow. Dofollow links would be much more valuable. You can use the NoDoFollow tool I mentioned earlier when looking at other people's profiles or signatures to determine this. Also, be sure to learn the policies of the forum. You do not want to spam, and you may get banned from the forum if you don't follow the rules.
Four: article writing. I think this is the best backlinking method, and I'll tell you why. You get to write an article that can help people find what they are looking for or answer a question they have, and you get to do so in your own words, so the readers get familiar with your voice. Each article has a link back to your site, and this is usually a dofollow link, so it also helps your search rankings. And other people can syndicate your articles on their websites. To do so, they have to keep your "resource box" which has a link back to your site, so that's even more quality links. It's a method that offers a lot of bang for the buck (the buck being time, not money, in this case). Posting the articles is free, and only requires an up-front investment of time in the form of writing and uploading the article. You can get even more bang for the buck by posting your article to multiple article submission sites. All of this equals a lot of benefit for the small up-front investment of time in writing.
I just started writing and posting articles recently, and I am already seeing some really positive results. The articles themselves generate some traffic, I have seen my articles posted on other websites which means more links for me, and my website has already seen an improvement in search result ranking. I think article writing is well worth the effort.
There are some things to watch out for, however. Some people use a practice called "article spinning," where they simply take someone else's article, change the wording, and repost it as their own. I would avoid this because I don't think it's very ethical. And I also like being able to express my own views, and I enjoy writing.
EzineArticles (ezinearticles.com) is the biggest site in article submissions, and you should definitely try to get your articles published there. Make sure you follow all of their policies so you don't get rejected. I also post articles to Go Articles (goarticles.com), SearchWarp (searchwarp.com), and Article Alley (articlealley.com).
One last suggestion about getting backlinks: if you start looking around for backlinking ideas, odds are you'll come across some offers like "2,000 links for $4.99" or something like that. I would avoid anything like this. Google hires a lot of smart people, and I think they are able to determine whether your link is adding value to the website where the link is hosted. Valueless links will probably be ignored by Google, and might even by penalized, making it harder for people to find your website. I would avoid any backlinking strategy that seems shady or questionable. Better safe than sorry.
I hope you find these backlinking strategies helpful. They are all strategies I have used, and some of them have been really successful. And none of them are questionable. Of all the methods listed here, I think article writing is the best. Be sure to stop by ER's Money Blog for more on blog promotion and online business. Thanks for reading!
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