7 Link SEO Tips for Bloggers

Do you take Link SEO for your blog seriously too?

2 days ago, we looked at using keyword SEO for blogs. Here are 7 Link SEO Tips that will help to improve your site’s ranking in the Search Engine Results.

LINKS

1. Anchor Text of Inbound & Outbound Links

Anchor Text is the word within a hyperlink. For instance, an About page – in which “About” is the anchor text – gives your readers an idea of about the content of the page I’m linking to, more importantly it tells search engines what the page is about. If used wisely, it will boost your rankings in search engines, especially in Google. As a major rule, DO NOT USE “click here” for an anchor text.

2. Origin of Inbound Links

Apart from the anchor text, you should make sure that the sites that link to you are not from bad ‘hoods. It is safer and better to have one inbound link from a reputable site with a high Google PR than to have one hundred links from phoney sites. In other words, who links to you matters.

Inbound links from niche sites close to yours have more credibility in the eyes of Search Engine than that of unrelated ones.

3. Directory Links

Be listed in directories like DMOZ Directory and Yahoo Directory. It will boost for your overall ranking.

4. Internal Linking is Powerful

One important element of SEO that I am just learning about is Internal Linking. This is the process of linking to other pages of your site within your archives. I just installed a plugin called RB internal Link. There is no better way to resurrect old posts from your archive than to link them internally in a recent post.

Do not underestimate the power of internal linking in the distribution of your PR. Link building is incomplete without proper internal linking.

5. Site Accessibility

Another fundamental yet often neglected factor that might affect your site ranking is the issue of accessibility. Often your site may be unaccessible due to broken links and wrong use of robots.txt that may cause your pages not indexed by Search Engines.

Broken Link Checker for WordPress will check and detect both internal and outbound links that don’t work and notifies you on the Dashboard of any broken links.

6. Sitemap

A Sitemap tells search engines where you’d like them to go. From a search engine point of view, a sitemap are useful for better and faster indexing while a plain HTML sitemap with the use of plugin provides ease of navigation for your visitors. Have a sitemap:

For Search Engines – Create a Google Sitemap online and add your Sitemap to your Google Webmaster account or if you are on WordPress, install Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator which will generate XML-Sitemap supported by most of the search engines.

For Your Visitors – Clean Archives Reloaded generate a list of your posts sorted by months for better navigation. To see an example, have a look at my archives page.

7.  Robots.txt for Duplicate Content

Creating a robots.txt file improves your blog’s indexation because it tells search engine bots to only index specified pages and to ignore others that you do not want on the search index because it may lead to duplicate content issue.

Here is a must read for WordPress users by Syed Balkhi “Robots.txt Guide for Wordpress – Avoid Duplicate Content”.

In Wrapping up

SEO can never be a one-time effort. It is not set-it-forget-it because the internet is forever evolving – and no; success will not be achieved in a day. It takes patience – lots of it, commitment and the continuous know-hows to succeed. All the above tips when applied may not push you into #1 but it will surely bring you one step closer to #1.

The key to SEO success is persuading search engines that your site is relevant in any search query. There are no hard and fast rules to SEO, it all boils down to the right mixture of quality content and quality inbound and outbound links with proper keywords optimization.

All the best with your SEO.

In which other ways do you SEO?