I have already given some ideas about creating internal links with Link Building a Tutorial (Internal) (see I just made an internal link right there). Still, now we need to do the critical task of creating External Links (i.e. links from other sites, that hopefully have a higher Page Rank than you). External links (hopefully) bring new readers to your site and can increase your prestige and page rank, so you need to take this topic very seriously.
I have learned a lot of methods for building up external links from my website THE Canadian Personal Finance Site (see I just created an external link for that site). Some have worked well, others not so much, so let’s wander through some of the methods that seem to help out.
Just Ask
One way of getting links from external sites to your site is by asking the external site owner to link to your site. This seems obvious, but it doesn’t happen often anymore either. I rarely add links to my websites from e-mails sent to me from sites I do not know about (sorry, if I linked to everyone who asked, I’d have a site of links and not much else). If the site owner doesn’t know of you and does not know you, don’t expect them to link to your site unless they are incredibly generous. You can try this method, but don’t expect a lot of success with it, unless you know other bloggers well.
Best of Posts
Another option is to create your own carnival, where you find the big sites in your category and create a Weekly Best of Links post ( an example of this would be my Random Thoughts: Slash into Lent post). You end up creating outward-facing external links, and if those sites see you linking to their content, they may do the same for you—not often, but it does happen.
Remember, with this kind of post, don’t include too many links because folks just don’t click that many links on any site.
Big Social Media Sites
The use of Social Media like “X”, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Mastodon and so many others seems to be the main way to drive traffic to your site. Having your site link to your Social Media profile, then helps you drive traffic back to your website. Examples you might ask?
- Facebook presences are great so for Canadian Personal Finance and Blogging and Security I have those set up.
- I have two “X” or Twitter portals the main one is for the Big Cajun Man but I have a personal one as well under my actual name.
- Tumblr seems to have fallen back into it’s naughty ways, but I am there as well for Finances and for Technology.
- Pinterest seems to create traffic, but I have no idea, but my main Pinterest account has many subtopics for Money and Technology.
- JetPack and Wordpress are other good areas to ensure your links appear. I get a surprising amount of traffic from there.
- Linked-in does seem to work as well.
Mainstream media mentioning you will also cause an explosion of links too, but that is very much hit and miss as well, but more exposure in Social Media, increases the chances of this kind of lucrative exposure.
Networking
Get to know other bloggers in your field or in your city. Meet them face to face or via Instant Messaging because the larger your circle and network is, the more links you will end up with. It’s not easy to do this (don’t leave comments about how you’d like to get together with the author on websites, that is just creepy), but you must try. Use Twitter or something like that and say you are in some city and looking for fellow bloggers to meet, you might be surprised who might answer (but also be careful, there are a lot of Trolls and Odd Folk out there too).
As with job hunting, networking is a key to building your site and links to your site.
With these two tutorials, you should be able to start building your stature on the web with internal and external links.
Life is a Carnival
Blog Carnivals are Done sums it up nicely. The concept of a Carnival was good, but it got overdone, and now there are very few if any public carnivals left. They are done.
Link Building Articles
- Link Building a Tutorial (Internal) a useful discussion of how to make sure your articles are well linked to each other.
- Link Building a Tutorial (External) the compliment of how to build internal links.
- Twitter Etiquette? (is that a thing?) Now that it is called “X” maybe there is no etiquette left?
- Guest Posts: Please Stop the Madness this is not the way, to quote the Mandalorian.
- Blog Carnivals are Done for building links, that is certain.
- Fix Those Broken Links there is no point in having a link if the Google Spider can’t find where you want it to go.
I am always thinking that the best way to get quality external link is from guest posting.
Forgot about that one, good take.
Comments are closed.