Start increasing website traffic by being more pro-active about link-building
Search Engine Optimization is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting ranked in Google. Another big piece includes getting enough inbound links to an article to tell Google that said article is worthy of rank.
Here are a few ways that you can get your articles distributed to the masses with little to no effort:
Comments. Do a Google search and find blogs that are talking about a similar topic. In the comments, leave some valuable feedback on their article including a link to your own article.
DON’T leave comments like “Great article, read mine!” (it’s tacky), but DO offer a paragraph or two that adds to the existing discussion and offer your article as a secondary reference that compliments the article you are commenting on. This method builds an inbound link to your website and it also gets your article read by the blog owner and other readers of the blog.
Other places to leave comments:
- Forums (Q&A and Discussion)
- LinkedIn Answers & Groups
- Yahoo! Answers
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Twitter. One of the fastest ways to spread your article around is to carefully construct an interesting teaser that describes the article, and post a link on Twitter. This can cause other people to re-tweet (forward) the link onto their own followers. Leave at least 20 characters in your tweet so that people have room to add the re-tweet lingo or a comment on your tweet. Twitter is our second largest driver of incoming traffic, and it didn’t take anything more than posting valuable content and links.
Bookmarks. Add the article link to your social bookmarks. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious are a good set for your starter pack. Submitting your articles to these sites is like distributing an online press release. Your article is live and people can choose to read it or not. If you want to have a more valuable following on these types of sites, try linking to sites other than just your own.
Mark, when this was written in 2010, no follow wasn’t as much of a standard but you’re correct that many blogs use nofollow tags for comments. Guest blogging on blogs that do follow is a great way to get inbound links these days.
Unfortunately, leaving comments on blogs is a useless practice for inbound link building as most blogs use a “rel=nofollow” attribute on comments.
In fact, THIS blog has all these comments set to nofollow, so ironically posting here is worthless for SEO reasons.
Mark
I have always wondered how one can create the inbound links, am glad you explained it very well. I have made a lot of mistakes in the past doing the wrong stuff. Thanks for the educative tips.
I run two service based businesses (real estate and painting) and I find that creating content that people really want to link to be quite challenging. Thanks for the help with the link building ideas though