How To Create Blog Posts To Attract Backlinks

The days of submitting your website to multiple directories, guest blogging and general bookmarking has well and truly past. So how can you build safe, quality back links to your website? The most effective form of link building in 2014 is creating high value, quality blog posts, but with a new twist!

What To Blog About?

The first point you should always remember is ‘would i read this?’. If the answer is no then the chances are nobody else will want to. Your blog posts should always be of interest, forget about the SEO involved with your content, we will optimise your content last. People usually read blog posts to find out how to perform or do a certain task or to find out the latest news in a certain industry. This is what your blog posts should be about for many reasons that i will go into now.

What To Include In Your Post?

Now we have distinguished the sustenance of your content we need to structure and make your post more appealing to your readers. People are lazy! They do not want to read 1000s of words before they get to the part of the blog they want to know. Always keep paragraphs as short as possible with headlines targeting the point of the paragraph. this way the reader can do a quick scan of your article to get to the point they are interested in, if they wish to do so.

Try and include relevant images within your post or even statistics or graphs backing up your article. Researching your article subject and collecting your data into an easy to read format will help readers understand your blog post more effectively.
Having a catchy article title will attract more views when you promote your blog post so think outside the box with this to attract these vital readers.

Always Link Out

Link out to other relevant articles that backup your post. This is the most important factor you should remember when performing outgoing links in your blog post — never (and i repeat never) use you’re outgoing links to increase search engine rankings for your clients, or any website. If you are using outgoing links to pass page rank with an exact match anchor text, you are sending alarm bells ringing to Google who will issue you with the dreaded ‘unnatural outgoing links’ message. Google will remove your website from their index until you resolve these outbound links. This will result in a huge loss of traffic and rankings.
As mentioned, your article should always out the readers experience first. Only link out to websites that support your blog and will be a useful extension to your own article. Using a rel=nofollow attribute on outbound links is advised if you are not 100% sure the website is trustworthy. Treat your outbound links the same as you would for your inbound links. You do not want spam inbound links and you do not want spam outbound links either.

The Twist – Internal Linking

Now here is the twist! if its possible to link to products and/or services within your post then do so. This will pass on any page rank to your product page and direct your readers to hopefully make a purchase. The more you promote your blog post, the more readers, social shares and back links your post will receive, which i will go into how to do shortly. The more people who refer to your post as a reliable source of information, the more Google will reward you, and your product page you’re linking to internally.

Now To Promote Your Blog Post

Now you have created this well structured blog post, made high value important content your readers will love its time to promote your blog post to attract more readers, social shares and of course your backlinks.
First of all you do the basics, publish your post on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. if you have a large social media following then people will read your post from social media alone. If you do not have a large following you need to do some more content marketing.
Letting the website owners you have linked out to that you have included them in your post is a great way to get exposure for your blog post. The chances are they have a large social following and will promote your blog post across their accounts. It is in their interest to get more readers on your post to increase the power of their back link.
Posting your blog post on blog directories will increase the visibility of your article and will attract these important links and social shares.

Respond To Blog Comments

Interacting with readers that leave comments on your post will add even more quality content and also encourage the person, or persons to revisit and even link to your post. If a new reader sees people commenting on your article then they will automatically think it’s a reliable source of the information they are searching for.

and finally…

Be patient! The chances are you will not be an instant success and attract huge amounts of readers from the get go. Just keep following the above steps and blog as often as possible. Do not blog for blogging sake, always blog for high value content for your readers. All the above can still happen to old blog posts the more established you become as an authority figure in your industry.