In the last article of Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies I discussed the most important aspect of blogging; and that was CONTENT. Without a clear content plan that answers the questions “What?” “How Much” and “How Frequently” your blog will quickly become a useless appendage in your internet marketing plan. This week …
Linking Strategies
Links are either “one way” or “reciprocal.” A one way link is a link you place on your blog/site to another and they do not have a link back to you. A reciprocal link is where you link to them and they link to you – they’ve reciprocated your link.
There are three linking strategies I will discuss here; blogroll, internal, and comment linking.
Most blogs give you the opportunity to share links with your visitors on the sidebar(s) – this is often called your “blogroll”. These links are always present and visible. They should also be limited to the most useful and complementary blogs/sites. You do NOT want your blog be an extensive directory of links – it only diminishes your blog/site. In the best of situations these links should be reciprocal. Unless there’s a special reason for a link to be in your blogroll only recip’d links should be here.
Internal links are links within your own content to other blogs/sites. While it is not as necessary to have these reciprocal it is generally a good idea to have all your links recip’d. These links might be to related articles, or to supplementary articles, or opposing viewpoints. If you quote someone, link to their blog or the quote’s source.
Comment Linking is a great way to reach many, many more users. Almost every blog has the ability for you to leave a comment on a blogger’s post. Typically, you are also given the ability to have your name linked to your blog.
Now … here’s where the guerrilla blogging strategies come in! Instead of your name use your keywords! or your company name. or your brand identity. For example, an author friend of mine is promoting her new book, An Unholy Alliance on her blog. Her goal is to leave one comment per day on a blog related to authorship, publishing, writing, mystery novels, etc. Instead of using her name, Judy Nedry and linking to her site, she is placing “Mystery Novel Unholy Alliance” or “Mystery Novels” or “Mystery Authors” in the name field of the comment box! With enough links like these, her site will be more likely to be in the Google top 10 in a search for “Mystery Authors” than others.
For example, when I leave comments on other blogs about web stuff I always use “Portland SEO” and the link to my site’s search engine optimization page and this will help me get much better ranking on that search term.
I recommend that you create a comment-linking plan for your site … I recommend that you leave one comment on a different relevant site every day. If you can do more, great! If you’d rather do 10 or 12 comments in a single day once each week, go for it! If you want to do 10 per day .. hallelujah! Just be certain you are comment linking on relevant blogs or on relevant entries if at all possible.
Side Effects
There’s a beneficial side effect to comment linking … most bloggers appreciate the fact that you are reading their blog and have taken the time to post a comment, and so, are highly likely to respond in kind. Now you have a perfect reciprocal link!
And one more thing, if someone comments on your blog, and their blog is somewhat relevant, leave a comment back on their blog!
Now check out Top Ten Guerrilla Blogging Strategies #4 – Utilizing Social Media.
Should have come to your blog first, I’ve wasted 30 mins searching around – Sigh* thanks anyway…
very helpful post, you should post more stuff related to this.
I don’t get it, what do you mean by the 3rd paragraph?
useful information you got up there, I’m here to give you a…. *thumbs up* Check back with me
Clifford, Part of the algorithm Google uses to determine Page Rank includes the value of link to and from your site. Basically, cross-linking between sites is an indicator of activity … more links more activity, right? We’ll if your website has dozens and dozens of links to and from other sites search engines like Google might think you are simply a link farm without any valuable content. However, if all of these links are between related websites ie websites in the same niche or industry, search engines perceive these as more valuable because it seems that your linking partners are coming to you for information.
This is a very valuable tip you are sharing.
I used to make sure I posted comments on blogs and forums of PR3 or higher of several times a week. During this time I saw my Google page rank rise.
However, life became busy and I stop this regular practice for approximately 5 months. During this time I noticed that my PR reduced by 1.
Now I realize that there could have been any number of factors contributing to this but I suspect the high quality backlinks was a piece of it.
I am looking forward to restarting this regular practice and see how it impacts things.