Link Building with Bloggers

One of the key factors that influence your search engine rankings is your PageRank from Google.  While a variety of factors influence PageRank, generally the quantity and quality of links on other sites that link to our site largely determine the PageRank of our site.

There are a lot of strategies that we can use to build links to our site, and in this post I am going to talk about how we can network with other bloggers to increase the number of links that point to our site.

Getting links from bloggers is a good idea for a few reasons:

1. It is easy to find other bloggers writing similar content.
2. It is easy to interact with these bloggers through commenting.
3. Getting a link in the sidebar of another blogger will index a link to your site every time that blogger writes a new blog post.  This can exponentially increase the number of links to your site.

Before I get started explaining how this works, I want to show you an example of how I did this with my site: The Independent Bloghorn.

One of the best tools for evaluating the number of links to your site is the Yahoo Site Explorer.  Here is what I see when I explore my site with this tool:

Notice in this example that my site has 1559 inlinks.  To put this in perspective, the site also currently has a PageRank of 3, so what we are seeing here is working.

I now want you to look at another screenshot that shows you a quick peek at what kind of links I am getting:

Notice how the majority of these links are coming from a few sites.  If you were to analyze all 1500 links here, you would probably find that most of them come from pages on harrisonprice.com.  I have so many links from this site, because he sometimes publishes 3 posts a day, and when he publishes new posts I get a new link for each one.

So now that you have seen that you really can get a ton of links from just a few blogs, let me show you how to find bloggers to link with, and what we can do to get them to link to our site.

Some blogs are better to be linked with than others, so (listed in order of importance) I am going to tell you 5 things to look for when you find another blogger to link with:

1. How frequently do they publish content?  We want this answer to be very often, and they should have a recent post within the last few days.
2. Is the content they are writing related to the content that you are writing?  We want this answer to be yes.  Since Google’s PageRank system takes into account the relevance of a site linking to your site, a link from a related site counts more than a random link from an unrelated site.
3. Is there evidence that the blogger is already linking to other sites?  We want to see that they are actively networking with other bloggers.
4. Are there regular comments on just about every post?  The presence of other commentators indicates an existing network that you can tap into, by becoming a participating member in the blog’s community.
5. What is the PageRank of the site?  Ideally we want to be linked from a site with a high ranking.  However, we need to remember that PageRank is dynamic, and bloggers that are effectively completed the first 4 steps I outlined here should see consisted increases in PageRank over time.  This is a “rising tide raises all boats” situation, so it might not be a bad thing to get a good link on a blog that might be new and just doesn’t have a PageRank yet.

When I am looking for new blogs with these characteristics, I will usually go to the blog directories.  There are tons of these online.  A good one to start with is BlogCatalog.com.  The reason why I like this directory is because there are tons of bloggers there.  Also when you start to browse categories, keep in mind that the top 5 blogs in any category are paying to be there.  A blogger who is paying to get exposure, is typically a blogger who is willing to network with whoever comes along.  In fact using this strategy is how I found Harrison Price’s blog, and probably owe most of my PageRank to his links to my site.

Once you find a blog that you want to network with, you can follow this simple process.

Step 1 – Put a link to the blog you found in the blogroll or links section of your site.  One of the best ways to indicate to another blogger that you want to share links is to initiate the process yourself.

Step 2 – Start Commenting on the blog.  Most blogs will have a comment box that looks like this when you comment:

When you make a comment and enter your URL into the appropriate field, your name will then act as a link back to your site.  By commenting on a site, you are subliminally telling the owner of the site and all the other commentators to come check out your site.  In most cases, the owner will check out your site.  If your new friend likes what they see, they will probably notice the link to their site and return the favor.  (Note: if the blog you are commenting on uses dofollow tags, these links will be indexed as links back to your site.  If you don’t know what dofollow tags are, you need to find out.)

Step 3 – If they don’t naturally provide a link to your site on their site, you can always ask them.  If they are actively networking with other bloggers, they will usually do this for you.

Step 4 – Continue creating content yourself and periodically commenting on the sites where you have links.

Step 5 – Repeat this process with the others who are commenting on the original site.  Chances are, you are all trying to accomplish the same objective.