August 13th, 2010 by Steve

The Internet’s an ever-changing virtual world, filled with both wonder and danger for the uninitiated. You might think that you’re doing everything right in terms of the SEO tools at your disposal. You might be expressing yourself well through a good and interesting blog on a well-made site, but does that mean you’re guaranteed to rank highly on search engine results pages? Unfortunately it doesn’t. While it’s still true that search engines will generally rank you well for having a user-friendly site that’s well thought through and features good content, the ways in which they evaluate you and determine your ranking are growing ever more complex, and it’s very easy to get left behind. You can bet that at least some of your competitors are actively blogging with the latest search engine results pages algorithms for determining rank in mind.

As well as rewarding sites for being user-friendly and featuring good content, search engines take many other factors into consideration when determining the relevancy of your site to users entering queries. As any good SEO company will tell you, link building is one of the most important things you can do to promote your site. It’s one of the crucial SEO tools and it’s one of the best ways of bringing users to your site outside search engine searches. Blogs, of course, offer immense potential in terms of link building. With this in mind the list of tips we have for you is packed full of ideas.

1. Remind readers to link to you. At the end of each post you can easily include a reminder that users can easily bookmark or link to your site.

2. Challenge opinions. Nurturing useful debate is one of the best ways to get noticed by more people on the web. Don’t be afraid of debate but choose your arguments with care and be responsible.

3. What’s that, a conspiracy? Conspiracies are just one example of a theme that will attract users to your site. While we’re not suggesting you deliberately pander to popular taste at the expense of good quality content, it makes perfect sense to keep your audience in mind!

4. Use Trackbacks. Think about the different software available to you for gathering information about who reads your blog and who links to it. Trackbacks represent one such useful tool. Through finding out about your audience, you can compile an excellent list of potential links and use it effectively.

5. Link to other as you would have others link unto you. Linking to other good pages in your blog is very likely to bring reciprocal links. Give careful consideration to who you link to though. Remember that search engines take all links seriously and that a poor quality one can damage your reputation and your chances in terms of results page ranking.

6. Become active with comments and forums. Remember that whatever your sphere of endeavor, there’s a pre-existing community that’s active on the net. Get involved by welcoming comments on your blog and actively commenting and contributing to forums yourself. You could be surprised how effective this is in getting new links and quickly.

7. Create a Squidoo page. Posting content on sites that aren’t your own offers a great opportunity to link back to your pages. One example of a great site that lets you do this is Squidoo.

8. Build a profile on Twitter. Social media offers great opportunities in terms of linking, and it’s currently taking over the world. Any business hoping to move with the times needs to get involved, so build a profile on Twitter, use it to ‘tweet’ and think of the potential that sites like Facebook offer too.

9. Intelligent links. Search engines look at the quality of links to your pages when determining your ranking for results pages. You might really want to think about making your blog so good that academic sites link to it. .edu and .ac links to your site are among some of the most authoritative and therefore the best.

10. Write content that’s likely to be included in directories. There’s no hard and fast rule as to what you must do to get in a directory. Look at directories and see what others have done right. Links back to your site will remain as long as the content is in the directory, so there’s enormous scope for bringing users to you site.

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