Shape parts of your website (like your blog) so they attract links automatically from other on-topic blogs and sites.
If you fill all parts of your website or your blog with promotional articles or mix too much commercial content with your more objective articles and personal anecdotes, you greatly reduce your ability to gain natural links. This is why I often recommend that companies should co-brand their blog and separate it from the regular commercial content of their site; it will be easier to attract links to the ‘pure’ blog. We have had great success with this strategy. Our blog (3net search engine marketing blog) is on top of the list at Top Ranked Blogs, and we continue to get about 100 click through referrals per month from that one link, for instance. multiply that by all the places where we have links (including places like Web-Pro news and WordPress.org itself) and our many profiles at places like Facebook, Active Rain, Associated Content, Digg.com, Twitter,…well you get the picture.
These referred clicks have a much lower bounce rate than regular hits: most of our traffic (2-1) comes from Google organic search: but the first time visitors who visit us from key word search are not of the same quality as the ones who click through from referral: our overall 60% bounce rate (the people who do not stay to load another page), drops to under 40% for referred traffic: and some specific key word searches (social media website design, for instance) have a 0%; that is correct: 0% bounce rate.
It’s a lot harder to get people to link to a “Buy This NOW” company blog than it is to create a catchy, co-branded blog who’s content and name are more targeted for attracting links and less stuffed with commercial content and a sales pitch. A gentle marriage is the best.
For search engine ranking purposes, what keywords people use to link to you (called a contextual link) are extremely important. If you co-brand your blog you can control (or more accurately encourage) what keywords other blogs and websites should use when linking to you.
The more links to your blog and to the individual posts that use the exact keywords you are targeting, the more successful you will be in getting traffic, and in achieving the rankings in organic key word searches for the terms that are relevant. If you co-brand your blog you can actually use your target search in the name of your site, meaning instead of getting links to Company X’s Blog, you’ll get links to “Niche Industry Keyword Blog”; and this will greatly propel your organic rankings.
When your blog structure encourages contextual links with the right keywords, and you add some detailed, objective posts, you can really gain links quickly.
In less competitive industries, adding an extra 100 quality links gained from a few good blog posts can make all the difference between being invisible and being found on page 1 of the organic key word search results that can make you wealthy.
Trust me: most people do not understand this stuff, will not do these things well, nor consistently. If you follow our advice, you will get traffic. The better you follow it, the more traffic you will get. If you know that you will not do this, it will behoove you to hire someone like us to do it for you, rather than to miss the business that you could have had for so little expense.
If you're still looking for a good team to take your project to the next level, the authors of the 2010 Rothman Guide to Building Successful Websites are available for free, no obligation, creative consultations that you will not forget! Call 1-866-945-1113 or e-mail your contact info to info@socialmediasystems.