Building Links With Blog Posts
Any one who knows anything about search engine optimisation knows that building links to a site is vital if you want to rank highly in the search engines. The link popularity of a site, the link text, and the content of the site the link is on impact directly on search engine rankings. Links from blogs have several advantages over traditional sources of links, such as directories. They are often indexed quickly by the search engines because they love the new content they find in blogs. The links appear more ‘natural’ because they are embedded within text and don’t have any of the tell-tale paid link signs (e.g. a list of links under the heading ’sponsors’).
If the whole post is about your site, the links are in context and can naturally use keyword-rich anchor text. If the whole blog is about the same theme as your site, the link becomes even more powerful. A great way to get links from blogs is from specialised site review blogs like www.planetstrange.co.uk. These sites often advertise their services on webmaster forums such as those at digitalpoint.com. These are often cheaper than blogs found through a middleman and review sites on topics as diverse as air tightness testing and childrens entertainers. Another approach is to use blog networks. These are networks of blogs (sometimes containing hundreds of sites) where a posts are published automatically across every site (or a proportion of them) possibly resulting in thousands of backlinks.
Sometimes the post is written by the network or can be provided by you. Probably the best, but most time consuming method is to search for relevant blogs and directly approach the blogger. It may be necessary to be more flexible about your requirements, i.e. the number of links to your site, the anchor text used and deadlines, but it could be worth it for a very natural link back from a highly relevant site.