5 simple ways to make your blog links better

Blog links can be amazing. Links from real, powerful blogs that have a strong subscriber base and an active community are worth their weight in gold. Not just in the usual way links are useful, but they are great for increasing brand awareness and industry authority.

But sometimes the natural format of a blog can dampen their power.

For example, over time blog posts move deeper into a site. They fall off the homepage and they get pushed out of category main pages as newer posts take their place. This natural progression results in most blog posts having limited internal linking from archive pages.

Sure there are plenty of add-ons and plug-ins to help keep posts interlinked and out of archive obscurity. There are plug-ins to help with interlinking and related posts plug-ins. But not every blogger utilizes these tools and you can’t twist their arm to make their blog more SEO friendly for you.

What you can do though is use a few proactive and preventative measures to help fight the natural dampening of link velocity from blog links.

Recommend Some Good Plug-Ins

If you have a link from a blog, and especially if you had a hand in making it happen, why not make a recommendation? If you asked for this link, or wrote for this link then you have an existing relationship. If a blogger isn’t interlinking their blog posts in any significant way, a little friendly advice might be warranted.

Try not to talk about SEO though. Instead suggest that interlinking could help their readers stay more engaged. Sure if they know about SEO they might appreciate the sentiment. But if they don’t, you might find yourself teaching a 101 via email.

Keep it simple and focused on the one thing every blogger cares about: their readers.

Build Links

Like it’s not hard enough to get links, now you have to build links to your links? Hey I didn’t invent the system, I just make observations.

If your blog post link doesn’t get some external link attention it’s not going to give you as much benefit as it could. Whether you wrote a guest post or got mentioned in a collection of useful links, if that page only has internal links, then it’s a minor league player in your profile. But if that page picks up a few outside links then at least it becomes Double-A.

Don’t leave the social media just up to the blog owner who hosts your link. They have tomorrow’s post to think about. Make sure you pitch in on the social promotion and help the post containing your link gain as much traction as possible. And when it comes to building links getting people to link to someone else’s content, that already links to you, is often easier than begging for links to your landing pages.

Title Tags

Optimizing title tags is a big part of on-page SEO work. But sometimes it can be useful in off-page SEO too.

If you’re doing content placement, or you’re featured in an interview or review, then you may be able to impact the title tag of the blog post holding your link. Do you want that blog post to rank for your keywords? Not necessarily. But a targeted title tag can add a bit of extra contextual relevance to the blog post and your link.

If your link has keyword anchor text and the page title contains relevant keywords as well, that’s a great combination. You’re sending a double whammy of signals to search engines about what this page is about, and also what your site is about. And those signals are incredibly important when Google or any other engine is trying to figure out who should rank for what.

Vary Your Bios

Guest posting is becoming a highly popular way to build links. If you’re doing it right you spend a fair amount of time pitching bloggers and creating content.

Obviously getting your link right in the content of the post is a little better than just having a bio link. But not everyone is game for that and you have to play by the rules.

Fortunately, the bio link is pretty standard on the guest posting circuit; you can at least impact that. Mix up the pages you target, the keywords you use and the text of your bio. These kinds of links are an excellent opportunity to target sub-pages which don’t get a lot of love and not using a boilerplate bio on every post helps keep each guest post free of any duplicate content.

Skip the Bad Blogs

Seriously, the best way to make your blog links more powerful is to be more selective about which blogs you get links from. You can’t control the links you pick up at random without asking. But if you’re going to actively pursue blog links through guest posting, outreach, or reviews, make it truly worth your while.

Settling for the bottom of the barrel links is almost as bad as not getting links at all. Why not really invest the time and talent to score placement on a truly great blog?

Getting a review for your electronics site on a blog that reviews everything from cheap office furniture to the best credit card offers isn’t really all that useful. Be honest with yourself, will the blog in question review anyone or publish anything? Does anyone even read these posts let alone comment on them or share them? If not, skip it. Ten of those links aren’t as good as 1 link from a blog that genuinely takes pride in its content and community.

Summary

Blog links can be a great way to pump up a link profile. They can be good for your brand and they can be good for your rankings. But all things considered they can have some drawbacks. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the details.

How a blog is interlinked, how many outside links a post gets, the placement of the link, the words in the title tag, and the quality of the blog all affect the overall value of the link. If you can address any of those weaknesses then you can consider it a win.

/Search Engine Watch/