All Entries Tagged With: "links"

Should You Include Outbound Links In Blog Posts?

It might seem prudent, if you have a business blog, to make all of your links point inward – that is, to your internal web pages. Indeed, I think you should for the most part, but there are times when you might want to do a little outbound linking.

The most important thing to understand about links is they are the currency of the web. On the one hand, “paying” another website owner with a link is an act of good will. But even more importantly, providing valuable information for your readers builds your own credibility and authority. If that means linking out then by all means do what is best for your readership.

But you do want your readers to stay on your blog, right? Of course you do. So should you chain them in and never let them leave? Let’s not be harsh. Here are three ways you can link to other websites outside of your property and benefit yourself and your readers:

1. Source Links – I usually just add the word (Source) – exactly like that, parentheses and all – in front of blockquotes that I use from other websites and link the phrase to the source to show attribution for what I borrow. This technique is best used sparingly, but it’s a useful technique. It gives attribution without encouraging the click through.
2. Trackbacks – Trackbacks are links out that also link back. You see a blog post on another blog that you want to comment on. Instead of commenting directly on the blog, you write a blog post about it and link to it. Your blog post will appear in the comments of that other blog with a link back to your post. This is a useful technique for sparking dialogue among peers and readers.
3. Outbound Anchor Text – The least desirable of the three methods is the outbound anchor text. You are actually benefiting the website that you link to with the anchor text, which is relevant, but the link also benefits you through relevant outbound linking. One thing to keep in mind is those outbound links keep you “tied” to relevant information elsewhere and if you do that often enough then the search engines, Google particularly, sees you as willing to provide valuable information for your visitors and rewards you with higher PageRank authority. That in turn benefits you with more readers and commenters.

The Internet is one big web where all the pages are interconnected. It’s OK to link out as long as you realize that you may lose some readers temporarily. But if your blog provides useful and valuable information, those readers will come back time and time and time again.

3 Things Your Blog Needs To Succeed

When it comes to business blogging, or commercial blogging, it’s not the same thing as personal blogging or blogging to make money. You are blogging to make money, but you are not trying to squeeze out revenue from your blog. You are using your blog as a marketing tool to lead people to your website so that you can close the sale and make money on your products and services. Your blog is the lead generator; your website is the salesman.

So what does your lead generation blog need in order to do its job well? Here are the three absolutely essential ingredients to make sure your company blog stands out and drives traffic to your website:

1. Quality, original content – Every day. We’re not talking about private label rights or recycled eye candy. Graphics are nice, but content is better. Eat a meal and not just a snack! Take your company talking points and turn them into a blog by getting into a real conversation with your customers about their needs and your desire to fill a niche within the marketplace. It all starts with quality, original content.
2. Links – You need to link to your website. Not just the home page either. I’m talking about real links to every page that is important on your website. And your links need to be in the body of your blog posts as well as in your sidebar blogroll. Take your important keywords and turn them into anchor text and link to each page on your website using the appropriate anchor text.
3. The right template – It can be custom-made, but it doesn’t have to be. An off-the-shelf template works just as well as long as it is SEOd properly. Your blog template needs to be crawlable so making sure that the code in your template makes it easy for the search engines to find what they need is absolutely essential. Your blog template must be able to attract a reader’s eye quickly and not drive them away, so attractiveness is important but even an ugly template with the right SEO will get you the traffic you are looking for. When it comes to getting ranked in the search engines, SEO is far more important than being pretty.

These are the three most essential elements to a successful company blog. Other things are nice, but without these three things going for you, you might as well hang it up. Everything else is gravy.

The One-Two Blog-Article Sucker Punch

I have a strategy I like to use online that I like to call the Blog-Article Sucker Punch. It revolves around the combination of blogging and article marketing, as if you couldn’t guess by the name. It’s real easy to implement and even easier to grasp because you only need one brain cell to get it, which means most of the human race qualifies.

First, you build a rock solid website. It must be optimized and it helps to have at least one landing page that you want to promote heavily. You can do it with any any number of landing pages, but the more landing pages you have then the more time you will spend marketing them. If you’re new to internet marketing you should stick to one landing page. This combination, however, can work for any number of landing pages that you want to promote.

After you’ve built a solid landing page that you want to drive traffic to, build a blog to promote it. You can build an onsite blog or an off site blog. Which you choose depends on several factors that we can cover in another blog post, but for now just plan on starting a blog. You’ll write to it every day.

How To Make The Blog-Article Combo
Work For You
The first thing you need to do is make sure your landing page is prominently displayed on your blog somewhere. It can be anywhere, but it must be on your blog somewhere. Secondly, write about your landing page or something in your niche related to your landing every day for 30 days. Don’t be over-promotional. Just include useful tips about what you are promoting. Give away your knowledge, but don’t give away the farm.

Also during that 30 days, write one article per day and submit it to 10 article directories each day. At the end of 30 days you’ll have 30 articles at 10 directories – that’s 300 starting links. Those links are not ends of themselves. They are the means to an end. What you are hoping to do is to make your articles readable and popular enough that other publishers in your niche will want to publish them. That’s not as hard as it sounds.

Let’s say that each of your 300 articles (30 X 10) is published one time per month for the next six month. Now you have 1,800 inbound links. Each of links will serve to push your website further up in the search engines for your keywords. Higher search rankings translates into more traffic. But you’re also writing to your blog during that entire six month period, and you’re writing to it every day. Because each blog post is a separate web page and you are linking back to your landing page with every blog post, you’ll have 182 additional links to your landing page – at a minimum!

Keep in mind that your blog posts will also be ranked in the search engines for your keywords. That will draw traffic and consistency in publishing daily will keep traffic coming back to your blog. Plus, if you promote the blog in other ways through social media and networking, you can get even more traffic. You’ll use your blog to drive that traffic to your landing page. All you have to do is sit down and count the links and the traffic. Do the math and you’ll soon see that the blog-article sucker punch is a powerful search engine marketing strategy that can make you money over time. But for it to really be effective, you’ve got to make sure your landing page is ready to close the sale.

Two Benefits Of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has taken on a life of its own. Thanks to Pligg and a couple of other open source platforms, social bookmarking sites are springing up all over the place. Just like article directories a few years ago, social bookmarking sites are a dime a dozen and now starting to gather in niches – just like articles directories in 2002.

The benefit to this is that blog marketers looking to expand their audiences now have the ability to do through so vertical marketing strategies that focus on building off site relationships that lead to on site relationships that lead to sales. Your social bookmarking initiatives can now be rolled into your marketing funnel, which allows you to caster a wider net. People will find your blog and website through a different avenue and it is likely that you will attract people to your blog and website that never would have found you otherwise – all because of a little social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking has two primary benefits: Link building and traffic generation. But keep in mind that many social bookmarking sites now use nofollow tags in their links and therefore you won’t get any Google juice out of them. But some, like Digg, do not. So you’ll get some link benefit out of social bookmarking, but the true value is in the traffic generation that can develop as a result of people seeing your articles and blog entries that might not encounter them any other way. If you aren’t using social bookmarking right now to drive new traffic to your website then you should start thinking about it.