Having a blog requires a lot of work. If you currently run one, you know just how difficult it can be to keep it updated on a timely basis. All these updates however might go un-noticed simply because you aren’t getting enough traffic to your site.
That’s where backlinks come into play. Backlinks are links that other people have placed on their sites that head back to your website. The more sites you have linking to you, the more website traffic you’ll get and the higher the likelihood that your site will get ranked higher in the search engines. It sounds simple enough right? But how do you go about getting those other sites to recommend you?
Here are 5 ways to help increase traffic:
- Use WordPress. If you aren’t using WordPress as your blogging platform of choice, you’re missing out on a whole world of traffic. But when I refer to using WordPress, I’m not referring to WordPress.com but rather having this blogging platform on your own site. It all comes down to a matter of what you can and cannot do on your own blog. When it resides on your own website, you can add in additional items called “plug-ins” that help to increase traffic to your site. These plug-ins let you add in buttons that let someone “tweet” your post to Twitter, suggest it to their friends on Facebook, bookmark your blog post for future reference and so much more!
- Create Linkbait. Now I personally am not a big fan of the term “linkbait” because I think it sounds like something just a little on the “dark side” of things but it’s really not. It’s nothing more than making a post that get’s a lot of attention from individuals and search engines alike. It could be something controversial, useful, or even something fun. Bottom line is that linkbait is something “interesting” that a lot of people will notice. Once they do, it has a tendency to create it’s own momentum online.
- Claim Your Blog. A very popular site online that aggregates blogs is Technorati. Be sure you’ve signed up with them and submitted your blog. Once you do, they’ll ask you to claim your blog so that you can prove that you are in fact the owner of that site.
- Get Social. Submit your site to social sites. One very easy way to do this is to sign up with a free service called Onlywire which let’s you submit your site to multiple places online with one click of your mouse button. Of course, you’ll need to sign up with each individual service that you want to submit your site to first which can take some time, but this little bit of additional work can save you hours in the long-run.
- Link to other blogs! I know that this might sound a little counter-intuitive but when you link to another WordPress blog, the owner of the site you’re linking to gets notified that someone has linked to them. This is called a “pingback” and oftentimes that website owner will approve your pingback and, once they do, you’ll have an instant link back to your site.
These are just five ways to get links back to your blog and this list is by no means comprehensive. There are literally dozens of ways to get links back to your site but these five will at least get you started on the right path.
