How do we stand out in the sea of millions of blogs? When you google “seth” the first thing that comes up is Seth Godin’s blog. Now that’s clout. What about the rest of us? How can we build up our search engine ranking?
- Write posts that are timely and/or controversial and/or helpful. Getting others to carry on the conversation or pass on the info, with links back to your post from their front page, is probably the best way to build up your search engine ranking. Write posts that get people talking, and linking. I used to hate to answer people on my own blog. I believed if I wanted to comment on their post, I owed it to them to leave the comment on their site so their blogs would look active. I still think commenting is important, but I recently made a rule that if my comment was over 200 words I’d answer on my blog, with back-links, instead of taking up a lot of space in their comments section. This does the blogger some good, I think.
- Join blog tours. I used to run my own blog tour, I had about twenty sites linking to me each month. That KidzBookBuzz page still has a better page authority than this blog of mine has, even though I only ran it for two years and I haven’t posted anything on it in over a year. There are several book blog tours in existence. Google “book blog tour” and see if any of them look like something you want to get involved in.
- Join a Carnival. I hosted one Carnival over a year ago and I still get hits on it each month. But more important to the “page rank” discussion is that each month you join a carnival, you have a site linking to your blog that you wouldn’t normally have. Check out this page to see if there is a Carnival you might want to get involved in or think about starting your own.
- Comment on Blogs that have Comment Luv or DoFollow Links. Commenting on blogs helps get your name out and eventually some of the people you see regularly on other blogs will come visit you. But if you can comment on blogs that tell search engines that your comments are important to them, that’s all the better.
What About Linking to Others From Our Blogs?
The good news is that you will never have to listen to me discuss incoming links, nofollow links, and dofollow links again. This is the last post. Well…at least for a while. 
The bad news is that after researching these things for a week, I am more confused than ever.
I started out thinking I’d link, at the bottom of my posts each day, to all the blog posts I read that day. I quickly abandoned that idea because 1) it was spammy and 2) a list of links unrelated to my post was not what I wanted to leave readers with.
So I came up with the idea of putting the links in my sidebar, like we did in the old days, but I wanted to link to individual posts, not just domains, so I thought I’d use one of the feed-reading blog roll plugins. After I installed the plugin I discovered link juice.
Link Juice
Apparently, we all have link juice and it is somehow important to search engines. If we spread the same link across too many pages on our sites, we leak out our precious link juice.
I quickly installed a plugin which would change all links on all pages except the front page into NoFollow links. But the plugin(s) I found only changed the domain links on the feed-reading blog roll to NoFollow. The individual posts all repeated as DoFollow links on every page.
ACK! They were sucking my link juice. I couldn’t have that.
Paying Bloggers Back for Their Time
So I decided to put up a page called “blogroll” (I am nothing if not witty and creative in my choice of titles). You can see it up there in my menu. Yeah, right under my header. I leave the page open in edit mode while I read blog posts each day, and I very quickly copy and paste URLs of every post I read, into that page. That’s my contribution to bloggers I read. I figure if I like them enough to read them, I can pay them a small bit for the time they are putting in by linking to them. Linking to them on back pages in my blog doesn’t do them much good at this point. The blog roll pages I just created have no page ranking, therefore the links there don’t count for much. Sigh. They have my domain authority behind them, which counts for something, at least. I hope.
That’s all I’m going to say about incoming links for a while. I may report next month on my blog roll experiment.
What do you know? What have I missed? How can we help our favorite bloggers by linking to them? How can we get people to link to our blogs/posts?
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tags: backlinks, Link juice, search engine rank, seo
I don’t know anything. I’ve been blogging for a long time now, since 2003, and the whole linking and stats and seo thing just gets more complicated every time I look at it. For some reason, my blog hits went down by about half a few weeks ago, and I have no idea why. I think Google, in particular, tries to keep these things a mystery so that spammers and commercial bloggers can’t game the system, but for those of us who would just like for people who are interested in the same things we are to be able to find our blog posts, it’s not at all simple.
Sherry´s last [type] ..1905: Books and Literature
Hey, Sherry. I remember you from years and years ago. I had a blog called All About Children’s Books. I was glad when I rediscovered you when you commented over at Redeemed Reader.
I hosted my old blog on a domain I owned, but the domain was not my own name. When I decided to use my name as a domain name, I imported my old posts, but I lost all my links and my search engine ranking.
So…semicolon is a cool name for a blog. I encourage you to keep it.
You have a good search engine ranking. Great, in fact. Have you ever put your blog address into the website grader or the blog grader? You are doing a lot of things right, apparently.
You’re right about the rules changing all the time. People figure out how to cheat and the search engines change the rules, I guess.
I have been reading and following your “seo” posts with great interest and mixed feelings. I do understand that you want to give “link love” to bloggers you are reading and enjoying but a lot of it feels very contrived and I get the feeling that you are spending a lot of time and energy on this (and writing about it) not necessarily with the desired results. Why not go about it in a more organic and natural way? For example I had bloggers linking to me in their posts, referring to a comment I made, or a book I recommended with a link to that specific post. That way the link becomes more relevant since it’s in a specific context and readers are more likely to click on it to check it out. I do appreciate these type of targeted and relevant referrals as opposed to more ‘random’ links. I am sure you can find similar ways to link to other bloggers in an organic way and maybe the quantity will be less, but the quality will be higher.
Apologies for the long post, but I just wanted to highlight a different way of looking at spreading the link love. Anyways, thanks for discussing this topic because I haven’t seen a lot about this within the book blogging community and it definitely gives bloggers something to think about.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Selina.
I can see why you think my methods of linking are contrived. They are contrived. No doubt about it. You might say that I am now starting to be “intentional” in how I link and where I spend time commenting.
I agree with you about the value of links in posts. That’s why my first point in this post was that the best way to get links was to write good articles. If we write good articles, then people will link to us in posts and that’s the best link we can have.
But I disagree with you when you say I’m spending a lot of time on this without getting the desired results. I don’t think I’ve been at it long enough to know what the results will be. The search engines have hardly had time to crawl my site. But I have friends who will be able to tell me next month whether they got credited with links from me and if their rankings were affected.
As to your point about my being able to link to bloggers’ posts in my post and thus give more value: I try to do that. The problem is that I read a couple of hundred blog posts a month. I can’t link to all of them in my blog posts. I can only link to a few. However, it takes me about ten seconds to copy and paste their link and title into an open document that lists all the posts I’ve read. That seems like a very small price to pay them for their taking the time to write a post that interested me enough to keep me reading.
Thanks for commenting. I’m going to write more about this in a blog post because I’m getting long-winded here. Never apologize for leaving long comments on my site. I am the queen of long comments, believe me. I love to discuss things. I love to give my opinions and hear the opinions of others’.
sally apokedak´s last [type] ..Bio
Wow, this is really good stuff. I’m gonna have to bookmark this post so I can refer to it again and again!
Vicky Alvear Shecter´s last [type] ..Roundup and Funny Friday
Zoinks. I have no hope of making any of this a reality any time soon. Have you ever considered hiring yourself out as a web/blog master? Seriously.
Trisha Slay´s last [type] ..70′s Flashback – Pete Rose Sings (and other bad ideas)
You are doing several things already, Trisha. Just add one thing a month, maybe. What about starting a carnival for Star Wars fans? Is there one already going? They are so easy to join. You just send one article that you’ve already written, to the carnival host. This way you connect with others who share you passion and who will buy your book when it comes out, plus you connect with people who will link to you. I’m not kidding, you have a great thing with the Star Wars angle.
Vicky has a great thing with her ancient Egypt angle, too.
Where can I sell my book if it ever is published? Where do girls who like romance fantasies hang out? On the one hand I have a bigger audience than you do, but on the other hand I don’t know how to find them because there is no niche to connect with.
heh heh. I know just enough to be dangerous, Trisha. I’m constantly breaking my site when I dink on it. No, I could never be a web master. I just get off on technology and like to play with it. If I were young again, I would get some schooling on this stuff.
Right now, I’m hoping to sell my book for a million bucks and hire a webmaster.
Hey, there’s an idea.
I like the first idea of writing posts on subjects that are likely to spark a debate. I guess the most important thing is to have a catchy title that invites people to read more.
Kristine Banks´s last [type] ..Panasonic Fuzzy Logic Rice Cookers
heh heh you also like the fourth idea: comment on blog that give you dofollow links, Kristine.
But since you actually commented on the post, the comment stands.
[...] Monday’s comments section, Selina said that my search for a way to share link love was contrived. I agreed, but I said we could call it [...]
[...] to practice what I preached in my post on how to improve search engine placement, I entered four blog posts from the last couple of months, into four different blog carnivals. I [...]