By this time, you must have heard about backlinks and how important they are if you want to make money bloggin. Essentially, back links are just incoming links, or links on other sites or blogs that go directly back to your own blog or blog posts. In other words, if a person “links” to you, the link on his site that traces back to your own blog is pretty much what a backlink is.
Sounds simple enough, right? But as unassuming as these backlinks are, they actually play a major role in boosting your site’s rankings in Google and other major search engines. In fact, these search engines will judge your site according to the number of backlinks that are credited to your site. The more backlinks you have, the higher your ranking will ultimately be. Between two blogs posts that deal with the same niche, and everything else being equal, the blog post with the higher number of backlinks will rank higher in Google’s search results for the same keyword relevant to both posts than the blog post with fewer incoming links.
Some backlinks are even better at getting Google’s attention than others. These backlinks have keywords that your blog is already focused on, and another kind of backlink called “anchor text” contains these keywords and leads the reader to a specific blog post on your site. Here are a few tips on how you can get more of these links and land higher on search engine rankings:
1. Comment on other blogs:
The best way to introduce yourself to other bloggers is by posting comments on their entries. Of course, you shouldn’t just post any comment for the sake of putting up one. Instead, leave a thoughtful comment that’s relevant to the post in question, and don’t forget to include your URL at the bottom of your comment. If you want to take things a step further, use your targeted keyword as your username, which will also be linked back to your own blog.
2. Hop onto forum boards:
Are you part of any forum board that deals with the primary topic of your blog? You can get an instant backlink there by editing your signature to include a link (with the right keyword) to your blog. Once you’ve done this, aim to become an active participant in the forum. Make intelligent contributions to discussions to show your expertise in the subject. By creating a good reputation on forum boards, your backlinks stand a bigger chance of fetching you a larger load of traffic.
3. Link baiting:
Link baiting is the practice of writing about hot news or controversial topics about the niche that your blog is focused on. If you can pounce on breaking news about your niche and write a really good entry about that topic, you’re bound to get some people linking back to you. This method’s a little trickier (because you’ll have to work at making your post unique and special), but it’s very good at making a lasting impression on your blog readers and visitors. Just make sure your title of your post contains the keyword that you’re targeting as it’ll be easy for webmasters to copy that as the anchor text for their backlinks to your blog post.
As you can see, getting more backlinks isn’t the hardest thing to do. Just don’t neglect the part about dishing out good content that will impress readers and keep them coming back to your site. In the end, there’s still no better way to promote yourself – and getting backlinks – than by writing great posts that your visitors will remember you for.
