« Build Blog Traffic: Backlinking

Here is another short and sweet post listing another technique for building traffic to your blog: Backlinking. This also overlaps into the SEO field as well. So if you have a “non-blog” website, you could benefit from this as well.

Backlinking is a term that describes the process of getting other websites to “link back” to your site, hence the term “backlink”. In brief, when a Search Engine encounters a link to your website, it counts that as a vote for your site. As a rule, the more backlinks you have, the better your web site’s Search Engine rankings will be.

I am not delving into Search Engine rankings with this post, but suffice it to say that you want lots of backlinks.

So, how does one get these coveted backlinks, specifically as it relates to a blog? Here are a few tips:

• One of the easiest ways of getting traffic to your blog is by commenting on other blogs, ideally ones are similar to your blog. If your blog is about technology you should comment on other technology blogs. However, don’t comment just for the sake of commenting. Leave a meaningful comment, not just “Nice job!” or “I agree”. Spammers do that and no one likes a spammer. Plus, the owner of the blog will probably just delete your comment and * POOF * there goes your backlink.
• Link to blogs similar to your own. Adding a blog to your blogroll or referencing a post on another blog are great ways of building traffic because, usually the owner of the other blog will reciprocate with a link to you.
• Submit your blog to online directories. Plan on spending some time on this step because there are literally hundreds of such directories. As with most things, some are better than others. One of the best listings of such directories can be found at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/. This list is really great and will benefit you greatly.

This post certainly did not cover ALL aspects of backlinking and we did not discuss the differences between a plain, old backlink and a quality backlink. We will leave that for another post (a very long post ).

If you are brand new to blogging, check out our post on blogging for beginners and check out our list of ping services that you should become familiar with.