5 SEO LINK BUILDING TIPS FOR BLOGGERS

Recently I posted my first SEO Tips for Bloggers post here, which seemed to go down quite well with you all (at least I think it did), so today I am back with my second SEO instalment, which this time will focus on five link building tips that you can be doing to help get your blog found in the Google search engine results, or SERPs, as us SEO’s like to call them.

The below five tips are all ‘white-hat’ methods to help improve (or start) the link building strategy for your blog. As Google is becoming more strict with each update that they roll out on what they deem to be ‘acceptable’ link building tactics, I would advise against any ‘spammy’ link building methods such as directory listings or article submission sites etc.

Keep reading to see my five suggested link building techniques that you can adopt to improve your blog’s SEO efforts…

1. Internal Linking

Starting with on-page link building techniques, internal linking refers to linking between pages of your own blog, directing readers and Google bots to other relevant articles and features on your site, thus acting as a form of navigation. For example, at the beginning of this article I linked to my previous SEO article, which is relevant source on the same topic. Internal links on your blog will pass across link authority and show Google that the page being linked to is important and worth looking at.

*Tip: I would suggest to set up followed links between internal blog pages so that these are crawled by Google Spiders (see tip No.2 for more information on this)*

2. To follow or not to follow…

Now that is the question?!

Something that baffles some people is when and whether they should be adding a “nofollow” tag to their links or not. For those of you who are not familiar with SEO, you may not have even heard about this debate before. Below I will try to explain in layman terms the difference between followed and “nofollow” links.

Google will count links as a vote for the website they are pointing to, on the general equation that the more links a site receives, the more popular it is and in turn Google will favour showing this site in search results over those with less votes. Therefore, every time you send a followed link to a site you are giving them a vote and also telling Google search spiders to follow and crawl that linked page when they crawl your site, in effect passing across authority from your site to theirs.

A link will be followed unless you add rel=”nofollow” to a links html code. When adding the “nofollow” tag you are telling Google not to crawl the linked website/page and therefore you are not assigning any value to that page/source.

Personally, as a general rule of thumb I will “nofollow” all links from my site except for internal links, links out to my social media channels and any sponsored / paid for content, but these preferences are individual and I try to minimise sending Google bots away from my site to crawl others where possible.

*Tip: Check your site-wide links and make sure that these have the “nofollow” tag. A site-wide link for example can be found in your sidebar or a widget that is seen on each page of your blog.*

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3. Writing Guest Articles

Now that we have covered the on-page link building basics, the next step is to build natural links towards your own blog from authoritative sites within the same niche, gaining some ‘votes’ for your own blog. One way to do this is by having a feature on another website – such as an interview on a fashion site – or creating some content to share on another blogger’s website or by writing for an online platform and publication. I mean, wouldn’t it be a dream to have a link from Elle or Vogue!

*Tip: When featuring on another website, check the page source to see if your link has a “nofollow” tag of not. If the link is a “nofollow” ask if they would be able to remove this and provide a follow link to your site, making sure that they are passing across some link juice and giving your blog a vote to Google*

4. Link Bait

To online marketeers, creating a successful piece of link bait can really make a client’s campaign hit the roof via social sharing and by generating a lot of links and votes to the said website. One form of Link Bait used commonly is an Infographic, but these are expensive and are tailored more for businesses than bloggers.

So what is Link Bait? Link Bait is defined by Google as:

“Content designed to attract attention and encourage those viewing it to create hyperlinks to the site, with the aim of improving the site’s position on the list of results returned by a search engine.”

Therefore, if you can create some content that goes viral and gets shared, written about online and linked to by thousands of people, then you really are on to a winner – just think of the ‘Keyboard Cat’ video that now has over a whopping 38 million video views and I probably cannot count the amount of times that there has been a link and reference to it in an article online or via social media.

*Tip: Whilst Link Bait sounds like a great way for raking in the links, I would instead advise you to create content that you are passionate about and to write articles that are link / share worthy in their own right, rather than doing something crazy or silly just to get a load of mentions (well, that is what I think anyway, lets leave the link bait for the big businesses out there instead)*

5. Blogroll Lists

Lastly, another way that you can acquire some inbound links to your blog is by getting featured on other bloggers blogroll lists. For example, if you also have a blogroll and some favourite blogs that you enjoy reading, why not reach out to them to see if you can also get a mention on their site too!

*Tip: Above are clean ways that you can build links to your site for SEO benefit. I would advise to avoid old style, ‘spammy’ links such as directory listings or article submissions etc.*

So that has been my 5 tips for building ‘natural’ links within and to your blog! The next instalment in this series will look in more depth at some of the factors / metrics used to measure the so called deemed ‘quality’ of your blog and also to look at some of the stats that brands and agencies may check before connecting with you or asking to collaborate on your site, as some people are all about the metrics!

If this sounds of interest, please stay tuned for part three of my SEO tips series and if you have any questions please feel free to comment below or tweet me at @CharlotteLewis_ on Twitter.