Link Building Tips To Make Your Blog Rank Higher-1

 If you’d like your blog to rank higher on the search engine, you’ll need to draw in links from other websites or blogs. Here are the link building tips you should follow to help your blog come up higher on the search engine results.

1. Make use of directories and blog communities

You can submit your blog to directories or blog communities which have various groups for you to join and interact with fellow bloggers. This will help you to create opportunities for link building through blog comments or natural links. Know about the blog directories where you can submit your blog.

There are generic directories like Yahoo, which will need you to pay in order to get your blog listed. If you have a larger operation or website, going with these paid directories may be worth it. But if you have a personal blog on a specific subject area, it’ll be better to join a blog community, especially one that deals with a particular subject. For example, if you have a travel blog, you can join the various groups in Travel Blog Exchange, which is basically a community of travel bloggers. It’ll help you to promote your blog and get links from the blogs in your niche.

Another reason for not using generic directories is that they may take a long time to accept your listing and they may have tough criteria also. Moreover, they may not get you as much enough traffic as the niche blog communities.

2. Participate in forums and Question/Answer sites

When you participate in online forums or Question/Answer sites that deal with your subject area of expertise, you can link your answers to relevant posts in your blog. Of course, some forums may deactivate the links if they find that you’ve included them forcefully. However, if your answers are good and the links are relevant, they may still keep it active. If the forum guidelines are against inclusion of active links within the answers, you can add your blog link to your profile signature. At least you’ll give a way to the forum visitors to get into your blog and find out what it deals with.

Some of the Question/Answer sites where you can participate are Yahoo Answers (having various categories), Wiki Answers (gets good traffic from the search engine), etc. To find Question/Answer sites or forums, search using key phrases like “Blogging forums” if your blog deals with blogging issues and “Personal finance forums” in case your blog is based on finance.

3. Utilize social networking sites

There are a variety of social networking sites where you can promote your blog and get links to your content pages. Not only do you earn links from these social networking sites but also interact with others in the network and create opportunities to get linked from their blogs and websites.

4. Plan your strategy for guest posting

Guest posting is one of the most common strategies for link building. Guest posting allows you to create content for another blog. On doing so, you may link to your blog from within the guest post or from your author’s bio. This helps in promoting your blog and getting traffic as well.

Now, if you’ve written a great piece of content, you’ll need to ask yourself whether the topic of your post is timeless, that it, it’ll remain valuable for a long time. If it is indeed timeless, you can keep it on your blog itself. That’s because it’ll build value over time and people may naturally link to it.

The next thing you should consider is whether your content is powerful enough to engage the new traffic you get through guest posting. If you aren’t ready with the content that can actually increase the number of blog subscribers, it’s not the right time to create guest posts for link building. If you still go for it, you may lose value because the new traffic may not find your blog content as convincing as your guest post.

Another thing to consider is whether the blog/site for which you’ll write the guest post has already linked to you. If yes, then linking to your blog from the same site again will not have much value SEO-wise. So, find out new blogs or sites for guest posting. However, if a popular and large website asks you to make frequent guest posts, don’t ignore it as it can help you to establish your web presence.

5. Maintain a smart blogroll

You should have a list of sites/blogs highlighted under the “Blogroll”. To make your blogroll useful for your readers, divide it into various categories and add a brief description of the blog included in each category. Now, if you list only the popular blog/websites in your blogroll, it may not benefit you. This is because, not all big names in the industry will link back to you. Instead, you should look for great niche blogs even though these may have less traffic. Such bloggers may be interested to link back to you and check out your blog as well.

6. Use article submission sites

Links through article submission may not earn you much value SEO-wise but it does help you in link diversification which search engines prefer. So, submit articles in various article submission sites like EzineArticles, GoArticles, etc. and add links to your blog from within the articles or the author bio. Other than getting links, you generate traffic to your blog, as the article pages of these sites often rank higher.