Top Ten Wholesale Blog » Blog Archive » Q&A on Blogging and Link Building

joepreston in Helpful Tools, Issues In Search, SEO

January 14th, 2008

This post is about increasing traffic to your blogs. I’m surprised about how lame and lousy answers you get from searching Google about this crap. You will get much better advice at bloggerunleashed.com but that guy is drunk all the time, he’s like the Boris Yeltsin of SEO.

Sharp-eyed reader Justin P. left a comment:

I’ve been dying to learn more about effective blogging and link building…what’s the deal?

I’m happy to disclose that Justin is a member of the Top Ten Wholesale team, but this is not a plant. I’m pretty sure he does want to know about this stuff, and I didn’t solicit this question in any way. And, I consider publicly answering your readers question part of the best practices for effective blogging. The great thing is even though that’s a pretty expansive question, blogging and link building go hand in hand. In that, posting to your blog is an outstanding way to build links.

1) RSS Feeds - If you use your RSS Feed right you can gain links. The audience of people subscribing to feeds are hard core information consumers. I have my own linkblog just of posts I read that I share. Lots of bloggers, marketers, and web publishers. But, all those people are making websites designed to go out to a general audience and they always need content. It’s very nice when they reference your content and provide a link. In fact that’s great when they do that. Sometimes, they may not do that, sometimes they may not send a link back and just republish your work. People get really upset about these guys and start talking about how they hate “content thieves” with lots of capital letters and exclamation points, but I don’t waste time with getting mad at invisible people and their web sites. I try to do what I can to make it work better for me. One of the keys to maximizing the links you get from your content is to use a footer on your posts with your links in it. I use a wordpress plugin called Feed Footer, and there is another good one called RSS Footer. RSS footer is super simple and very effective. Feed Footer offers granular control of what you do with your footer and is a very powerful tool in the hands of the right person. It’s entirely appropriate in my opinion to add other related sites to your footer. If you are writing great posts, this will really help you generate more links.

2. Blog Directories

When you are starting the marketing process for a new blog. Blog directories like BlogCatalog are a tempting prospect, but getting backlinks with a wordpress blog is cake, so what’s the point of it? Meaning is there traffic for you? I think there is if you are targeting them precisely. Trackbacks are going to get heavily discounted based on the pagerank value of the referring site soon, so I wouldn’t bother too much with them. I think you have to write comments on big blogs, and get them past moderation. At this point I say avoid the larger directories like mybloglog and bumpzee. I get a little bit of seo traffic so sphinn does ok.

3. “SEO 2.0 is about link love” — Dofollow=Groovy

So you gotta give me a dofollow..

That means install the dofollow plugin. Try to enjoy it while it lasts. What will kill it is organized rings of dofollowers, who start to moderate there posts ruthlessly throwing out people from the wrong side of the tracks like me. Those guys will grow like mold in pligg sites, or BloggingZoom, which you should not run on your blog! It is unsafe, I had it checked out by the somber titans of the toptenwholesale.com technical staff. By the way if you don’t pay attention to your programmer’s technical review of your easy-to-install plug-ins, you are an idiot, begging to be fired.

Posts I Like But Aren’t Super Related to this Because Who The Hell Writes Posts Like This One?:

A Valuable Tip - Use Pligg sites to get good longlasting backlinks.

2 Responses to “Q&A on Blogging and Link Building”

Vic Says:
January 14th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Blogging Zoom has NoFollow on links so it could not be used as a link farm.
joepreston Says:
January 15th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Hey Vic! I should have been more specific, the concern is mainly that it calls an external function. I know you aren’t trying to scam anyone - I have run blogging zoom on my personal blog, in fact. But, this blog is a corporate blog, and external functions in the wordpress plugin create opportunities for exploitation that would be out of our control.

2 Responses to “Q&A on Blogging and Link Building”

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