Backlinks are still very important for SEO, even in this time of increasing social media authority, but they’ve become increasingly more difficult to earn. Panda (February 2011) and Penguin (April 2012) killed all the lazy ways to gain backlinks (and good riddance) but it’s not enough these days just to create great content.
Here are ten ways to get people to link to your content in this new era of the web.
Content is still king, but a king standing alone will get you nowhere. Carefully research, then write and publish some pillar articles. The general rule of thumb is to spend four times as much time promoting your content. If it took you several days to research and write your 5,000 word article, you could have a few weeks of promotion ahead of you.
The problem with content is that there is so much good content now that it’s hard to sift through. Bloggers tend to form cliques that will share and comment on each other’s material. Part of your job as a blogger is to find and interact with a clique so that they will bring you into the fold.
Every blogger will need a break every so often, and that’s where you can step in with a guest post. Having quality content on your blog will give you social proof that you know what you’re talking about and can generate content they’d be proud of to have on their blog.
A blog should have a target audience in mind. As part of your research, you should also do keyword research on that audience’s interest and write blog posts with those in mind.
Place relevant key words intelligently into your blog posts and titles. Titles should have keywords closer to the beginning of the title and any keyword should have less that 2% penetration and read absolutely naturally, just like if you were reading a normal magazine article about something.
Support other people with links back to their posts and content. People are much more likely to accept you as a guest blogger or allow a link in their comments if you do the same for them first. However, you should try to stick with people that have high authority in your field. Google looks deeply into authority these days, not just the sheer number of links.
Trackbacks are a way to both promote your own posts and show appreciation for another person’s posts at the same time. When you link to another person’s blog, sometimes you’re permitted to send a small comment back to the page you’re linking to. This is a trackback. Not all bloggers allow these on their site, but it’s suggested that you allow them on your own site. It’s a great way to see how other people are using your content.
You need to get your content out there into social media networks. People use social media as their first determinant on whether something is “good” or not. If your content isn’t out there on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or some other social network then you’re invisible.
If you’re making a blog as a content marketing vehicle, your tags and categories should align with what people are looking for.
Nearly anything web-related can be tracked with an analytics packages. If you want to blog for more than just fun then you’ll need to analyze what is catching their attention.
This is a really good article on attracting quality backlinks. As Matt Cutts said, Google is trying to index “content worth linking to.”