Link Building Tips to Get Backlinks and Increase Traffic to Your Blog

An important but often overlooked part of search engine optimization (SEO) for bloggers is link building. However, there are so many disreputable SEO companies that rely on spam techniques for link building, that the practice of getting quality backlinks doesn't get the credit it deserves. Quality inbound links can increase direct, indirect, and search traffic to your blog through social sharing and organic search. Use the 10 link building tips below to get backlinks to your blog that are high quality and will increase traffic to your blog.

1. Write Useful, Interesting, and Fresh Content

There is no better way to increase organic search traffic to your blog than to frequently write interesting and useful content. If your content stinks, no one will want to read it, and if your blog is never updated with fresh content, no one will ever find it. If your content isn't worthy of being linked to, you won't get valuable and useful incoming links to it. 

2. Create Highly Shareable Content

Some types of content are naturally more shareable than others. For example, infographics, in-depth tutorials, embeddable images and widgets, research reports, videos, and ebooks are all easily shareable. People like visual stimuli, so images are important to give your blog content a chance to be shared and linked to again and again.

3. Avoid Tricks and Designs that Damage User Experience

Don't sacrifice the user experience on your blog for tricks that boost page views on your blog. These tricks can do more harm than good in terms of the shareability of your content. Slideshows are a perfect example. Think of it this way -- which site would you rather link to and share with your own audience - the site with all of the information on one easy-to-read page or the site that makes you click through a ten page slideshow to see all the content? Furthermore, blogs cluttered with slow-loading ads and images are also less likely to be shared than clean blogs that load quickly in a visitor's web browser. Always think of your reader first and sharing, links, and traffic will increase naturally as a result. Finally, don't pay for incoming links to your blog unless you want to lose all Google search traffic in the future. Instead, follow the five ways to increase organic Google traffic to your blog.

4. Create Resource and FAQ Pages

People love to link to pages that provide tons of useful information and resources. With that in mind, create resource lists on your blog that compile links to all of your best posts on specific topics in a single page on your blog along with snippets about each article. Also, create a frequently asked questions page about topics related to your blog and fill it with answers as well as with links to posts on your blog that answer those questions in more detail. Even resources pages that link to external sites can be highly shareable. For example, bloggers who create list posts like "The 10 Most Important People on Twitter You Should Be Following" or "20 Blogs About XYZ You Should Be Reading" often go viral. Just make sure to include more than a list of links on a page. Add some descriptions and text to give Google and other search engines something to crawl.

5. Create Round-up Posts

Round-up blog posts have been used by bloggers for years to accomplish a few things: to share links to great content from other blogs and websites with your audience, to link to great blogs and websites to get on their radar screens, and to generate sharing of your own round-up posts which creates more backlinks to your blog. If your round-up posts are comprehensive, targeted, or just plain great, people will share them.

6. Create Templates, Worksheets or Useful Documents

Are there any kinds of templates, worksheets, spreadsheets, plans, or other documents that people interested in your blog topic need? Create downloadable templates to help them get started with whatever task they want to accomplish and offer them for free on your blog. For example, a web design blog could offer templates for creating a Facebook cover image or a Twitter heading image. Freebies are highly shareable!

7. Write and Publish Quality Guest Posts

Guest blogging is a great way to boost incoming links to your blog, but focus on publishing guest posts on quality sites that provide valuable backlinks to your blog. Low quality sites could do more harm than good to your blog in the long-term if Google devalues your blog because of them.

8. Write for Other Blogs and Websites

Many top bloggers have something in common. They have written for other blogs and websites (and many still do) as volunteer or paid contributors. As long as bloggers can include links to their own blogs in their post bios on those other quality blogs and websites that they write for, then they are generating valuable incoming links.

9. Make Sure Your Blog is Search-Friendly but Not Over-Optimized

All of your efforts to build backlinks are helfpful, but you won't see an increase in organic search results if you've over-optimized your blog. Too many Google penalties will negate your backlink efforts, so be careful.

10. Repurpose Your Content

Extend your blog posts by repurposing them and publishing those new versions of your content across the web. Always include a link back to your blog anytime you publish your repurposed posts. This is a fundamental content marketing tactic that works!