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! 

How to Really Grow Your Blog Traffic

Firstly, a few words about other guides, blog posts, and entire blogs on blog growth. Forget about them.
Chances are they’ve been full of fluff and haven’t gotten you where you want to be.
I’ll start by telling you two tips to blog growth. They’ll make all your efforts more worth it, meaning everything non-blog-growth related you do with be more worth it. If you don’t read the whole post, you’ll at least benefit from these.

Tip 1: Social media is next to nothing. Your growth doesn’t depend on Twitter, or Facebook. Unless you have a massive following and use a media platform to tweet your messages 500 times a day, it’s not worth it. Facebook marketing, if you haven’t noticed, is a bag of hot air waiting to burst. It’s leaking as you read this.

Tip 2: Loyal readers grow blogs. Excited, loyal readers will do more for your blog than you can and will. They’ll comment, share, like, and buy from you all while you’re not even blogging. That’s the holy grail of blogging and what you’ve probably tasted, at least to some extent.

I specialize in keeping readers on blogs for longer. Bounce rates, retention, interaction, and the like. Why? It’s actually just the area of blogging I chose to specialize in. College lets you choose your major, and in my opinion, so does blogging. Darren Rowse focuses on digital photography, and Glen Allsop covers SEO. It’s really wherever your heart is.

Keeping readers on your blog and building relationships is the key to growth. If you’re not succeeding at this, your work might be phenomenal but it’s not going anywhere big. That’s sort of the bad news. The good news, is that you can improve. Surpringly enough, you can retain readers and grow your blog more by changing the most simple things.

Take a look below. I’ve focused on 5 parts of a blog that make or break it. I’ve also included slight modficiations you should make to keep your blog airtight. Do all of this and you’ll win over readers, and once their on your side your work will truly take off. Note: I focused on these 5 techniques this past summer, and by summer’s end my pageviews and subscribers had more than doubled.

Titles

Don’t sell yourself short with boring post titles. Do you spend three hours writing and editing a post, then slap a generic title on it? It should be the opposite. Your titles should pop, and make people click. Erase a few posts titles, and convert them to statements that challenge your reader’s beliefs, or relate two seemingly unrelated things.
The general criteria for great titles are: challenge, relate, and explain.
My post “How Playboy Helps your Blog” airing soon on ProBlogger.net relates in a unique way. When you pose a statement that relates unrelated things, you catch the reader’s attention, and from there all you need is a good intro. The Blog Tyrant writes gripping posts, like “Why Your Post Style and Structure is Killing Your Blog.” These titles evoke emotions and get clicks because of it. Excited yet?

Tone

You must sell yourself through writing. Hate to say it, but it’s not enough to write good information and it never has been. If you don’t boost yourself, talk about your own expertise, and show some social validation, how the heck are people supposed to know you’re a legitimate source? Your quality advice, research and information literally sails off the face of the interwebs if you fail to insert statements on your own knowledge. Build your tone up with bold statements, and again, challenge readers. Look at what major bloggers with strong personalities do. They’ll begin with bold statements, end sentences with questions, and include little “notes” of how their techniques have worked.

Images

Are your images random, irrelevant or things only you find funny? I’ve got two words for you. Delete them. Images are ONLY useful if they clarify a point or create curiosity. Those are the criteria I’ve lived by since day 1 and I’m doing alright. Or, just roll without images and let users focus on your text. See how DailyBlogTips doesn’t use many images? That’s a good thing. It’s a subtle way of telling readers what’s important, and where to focus.
Place as much emphasis on your images as your text. If you do a clever job relating images to text, even in an abstract way, you’ll tell readers you know what you’re talking about.

Diversify

Show that you know your topic, and hit users from a lot of angles. Now I know this is a broad statement, but it’s actually easy. Diversification in blog posts can be quick and painless. If you’re an online marketer, insert a case study into a post. If you’re an artist, show a crafty coloration you did with someone semi-famous. Even things like tweets, quotes, or charts from Google Analytics can be inserted in your posts to show readers you really know your topic. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and hide your knowledge into with huge blocks of text. Not even your mom will read that.

Links (my best point)

You want people to click your links, right? Especially if they go to related posts, or better, to affiliates you’ve setup deals with. So make your links clickable. Place links around action verbs. I pitch premium themes on my blog from Theme Junkie, because that’s what I myself use. I generate clicks with words like “browse beautiful themes”, “upgrade your look”, and “go pro today”. I’d get a lot less clicks with link-text like “check these out” or “click here” that people are sick of. Another trick? Make your links pleasing. Give them a hover color, so users feel like their grabbing the link instead of just floating on it. Just a subtle trick that works. Google “hover link color” to begin.

That’s 5 solid tips to make your content gripping, win over readers and encourage them to click through and share your content. Do you think readers share boring content, or things they’ve seen 10 times already? No, and they’re not sharing your content if it looks that way. These are things the bigger blogs do as second nature that help them remain at the top of blogging. Stop wondering, start doing, and always savor the small gains in blogging.

Greg hold two advanced degrees in social sciences and blogs at Dear Blogger, where you can ask him any question on blogging.

Post from: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-to-really-grow-your-blog-traffic/

What Is Pinterest?

Introducing Pinterest:

Pinterest is a visual bookmarking website that allows you to "pin" images and videos that you find online and want to save or share with others onto virtual pinboards. It's similar to popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, but you can only pin images and videos on Pinterest. People can follow you or your pinboards on Pinterest, and they can repin the content you share that they like, which adds it to one of their own pinboards. You can do the same thing with content pinned by other people. Users can also comment on each other's pins and "like" them.

More Pinterest Feature Details:

Pinterest is very visual and very social. You can create as many pinboards as you want and categorize them for pinning in any way you want. For example, you can create a pinboard called "Things I Like" or a pinboard called "Movies I'll Never Watch Again." It's up to you. Since all pins are either images or videos, Pinterest is a highly visual experience.

Pinterest offers a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your web browser toolbar, so you can instantly pin any image or video you come across as you're browsing the Web. You can also add a Pinterest button to your blog, so it's easy for people to follow you on Pinterest or pin your content at anytime.

When you see a pin on another person's pinboard that you like, you have five choices. You can follow that person, follow that pinboard, like the pin, comment on the pin, or repin the pin onto one of your own pinboards, making it easily accessible to you and visible to your followers. When other users perform the same actions when they find your pins, your audience grows and your pins' exposure grows. That means more potential traffic to your blog and more relationships that can lead to blog traffic and growth.
Who Is Using Pinterest?:

Pinterest is currently used primarily by women between the ages of 25-35. However, the site is growing incredibly quickly, and the audience is getting more diverse. Many individuals use Pinterest just for fun. It can be a hobby to pin things, similar to scrapbooking for many users.

Businesses use Pinterest to share images from events, to show off customized product collections, and to show customers using their products. Pinterest's terms of use policy clearly states that the site should not be used for direct promotion, but creative businesses find great ways to share their products and services without using blatant self-promotion tactics.

In other words, there is room for everyone to use Pinterest for a wide variety of personal, professional, and business purposes. Even nonprofit organizations can be found using Pinterest to share images and videos of events and stories.

Is Pinterest Right for You?:

Pinterest is a great choice for people who don't need to write lengthy blog posts and don't require a robust blogging application like WordPress or Blogger. It's a better choice than Twitter if you want to share primarily images and videos rather than text. And it's a better choice than Tumblr if you don't have a desire to share text and audio in a blog format, but prefer the pinboard style of Pinterest. Furthermore, if comments and two-way conversation are important to you, then Pinterest is a better choice than Tumblr which offers a more limited commenting feature.

Bottom-line, if you want to share, find, and discuss images and videos in an easy-to-use setting that mimics a billboard concept, then Pinterest is a great choice for you. If you want more features than image and video bookmarking, sharing, discovery, and commenting, then you should look into using a microblogging or blogging tool.

By Susan Gunelius, About.com Guide