Search engines are one of the most important sources of traffic for blogs and websites. Traffic from search engines is free and targeted. The more targeted traffic you drive to you blog from search engines or using other methods the more money you will make displaying ads or selling affiliate products.
To drive traffic from search engines you will need to optimize your site for the search engines. Search engine optimization or SEO involves two components: off page SEO and on page SEO. On page SEO is writing original content using words and phrases that people use to search online called keywords, titles and meta description. By doing on page blog optimization will help search engines like Google understand for which keywords to rank your website but if your site has low page rank your posts will be low on the ranking because as the search engines see it, your site has no authority.
Off page optimization involves building quality backlinks on other websites and blogs that point to your site. The backlinks pointing to your blog will determine the pagerank of your blog. Pagerank is an algorithm used to determine the importance or authority of a website or blog. The more authority your blog has it will rank higher in the search engines and as a result drive more traffic from the search engines. Because of this it is important build quality backlinks to your blog.
Where can you build backlinks to your blog?
There are millions of blogs and websites online where you can build backlinks pointing to your blog:
- Other blogs. Blogs that are of same or similar niche like yours are great place to build links pointing to your blog. You can build backlinks on other blogs by commenting on the posts. With every comment you can leave your name, email and website and when your comment is published you will have backlink to your blog. When commenting on other blogs don’t write just about anything and spam other blogs. Read the post and write your comment giving your honest opinion and some new information to supplement what the post is about. If you just spam other blogs their owners will simply not publish your comment. Another way to build backlinks on other blogs is by writing guest posts. Some blog owners accept posts from other bloggers and allow them to include links pointing to their blogs. You can submit your posts with backlinks to your blog included. If the owners likes your posts , it will be published along with the backlinks pointing to your blog.
- Online Forums. Another good place to build backlinks are online forums. Forums allow their members to include signature along with their posts and even include links in their signature. You can include backlink to your site in your signature that will be published with every post you make. Some forums may require their members have a certain number of posts before they can include a signature in their posts. When postig o forums try to be useful and contribute to te discussion and not spamming the forums for the sake of posting and having your signature in the forum because you can get banned.
- Article directories. You can create backlinks by writing an article and submitting it to article directories. When you submit an article you can include links in the article or in the resource box. Thre are a number of article directories online and before you submit your article be sure to read their guidelines. Article directories may have certain guidelines concerning things like length of the article or number of links you can include. Following these guidelines will help your articles get published.
- Social bookmarking websites. Social bookmarking websites are sites where member bookmark links to websites and blog that contain content they find itusefuland for future use or sharing it with their friends and other members. You can join social bookmarking websites and bookmark your blog posts to build backlinks to your blog.
There are two things to consider when building backlinks for SEO purposes. The sites where you will build your backlinks should:
Have Do Follow links. You can build backlinks on almost any kind of website or blog, however for SEO purposes the links you will build must be Do Follow in order to pass on authority to your blog and increase it’s rankings. So the question is how to find which sites are Do Follow and which one are No Follow? There are several ways to tell which sites have Follow or NoFollow links but the easiest way is if you use Firefox browser you can install NoDoFollow extension which will highlight No/Do Follow links on a website.
Have high PageRank or PR. The backlinks from websites or blogs that have high PageRank are more valuable for SEO purpose than blogs or websites with low PageRank. PageRank of a website or a blog is assigned by Google and it determines the importance or authority of the site. The higher the PageRank it has the more important the site is considered to be by Google. PageRank can be from 0 to 9. New websites or blogs have PageRank of 0 and older established websites have higher PageRank, for instance Google.com has a PageRank of 9. Because of this you should build your backlinks on a websites which aside from Do Follow links have also a high PageRank. You can check the page rank of a website or blog easily by going to prchecker.info. If you use Google Chrome browser you can install SEO Status PageRank/Alexa toolbar which will check the status of the website you are on.
Building backlinks to your website for SEO purposes should start with making a list of websites that have high PR and dofollow links. Once you make a list of websites you can start building backlinks by commenting on blogs, posting on forums, guest posting on blogs with similar niche like yours, submitting articles on article directories, using social bookmarking websites etc.
