Link Building is the next step on your journey to developing an awesome blog income life. Lets review where we started and where we’ve come to:

  1. topic
  2. keywords
  3. domain
  4. platform
  5. posting
  6. article marketing

By now you should have lots of posts on your blog, and by default you have done some link building without knowing it.  If you have done any article marketing, you have links that connect your articles to your blog.  If you downloaded my free PDF on ABC’s of Blogging for Money and followed the chapter on driving traffic, then you will have additional links from your comment postings on other blogs and in forums you may be participating in.  These are backlinks and that is what we want lots more of.

What exactly is a backlink?

Well firstly what is a link?  A link is a pathway between one site and another.  A backlink is a site that takes the reader from another site to yours, it is also know as an inbound link.  This is what links look like:

http://www.naturaldogskincare.com

That is the URL for the dog site that I opened for this year’s 30 Day Challenge.

Pretty much everyone on the internet knows that if they click on this blue/purple lettered underlined phrase, they will be taken somewhere else, in this case to my site.

Off the top of my head I do not recall if any of my postings had links to any of my other dog sites except for the K9 KlearUp product.  But supposing I did.

A visitor is on my dog skin care blog and while reading an article comes across a link to my raw dog food link, clicks that on, from that site clicks on to a link I might have posted about best dog food diets, which may or may not be mine – lets say it belongs to someone else, from that site they may click on a link that takes them to a pet insurance site and so on.  Can you see the pathway that has been created?

See how the more backlinks we have on the internet, the better are the chances of users finding our site.

The pathway created is also a pathway for search engines to follow.  When a search engine comes across a link to our site it sends out bots or spiders to crawl that link to report back on the content.  Those critters will continue following the trail before eventually coming back with a glowing report to mother search engine on how well your site is thought of by other site owners.  Search engine makes note and promotes your position withing its rankings.

This overly simplistic explanation, is one way that search engines build up their data bank.  Google and other search engines look at several things when assessing those links including:

a.  Is the link hosting site’s content congruent with the links
b.  Is the link hosting site ranked well

On this point, in the example of the dog skin care link, the content of that link does not meet the congruency test.  To overcome this I have added a bit of content about dogs.  Now it makes it somewhat relevant. The ideal option would have been to use some of my other blogs on income building but they are all currently under renovation so would not have been a good example.

A word of caution here.  Online marketers quickly caught on to the benefits of posting comments on other’s blogs just for the sake of getting the backlinks.  It wasn’t long before comment spamming reared its ugly head.  One way to explain what comment spamming is to cite the many instances that a comment added to a blog does not add any value, a common such comment would be something like “Great Post” or ” Good stuff, thanks for the post”.  While not necessarily absolute the comments do beg the branding of being spam as they appear to be just milking the system to generate backlinks.  Now there are systems which have a “no follow” rule,  so that when search engines come crawling and they come across these backlinks, the “no follow” rule tells the ‘bot or spider not to follow that link.  More on this at a future date.

The second item is more difficult to control.  It is not the easiest thing to get a good backlink from a highly ranked site, say a Google PR 5.  One way is to post comments on such high ranking content congruent sites, but again, Google assigns a lower value for comment generated back links than if the owner of that site mentioned yours within her content or put up your  link in the “recommended” links section.

By building your link network you are developing credibility and authority with the search engines.  They view backlinks as votes of confidence from the owners of those sites.

Your job if you want to drink fine wine, feast on gourmet foods, travel to exotic destinations and live in the house of your dreams is to generate a massive blog income.  Your mission should you decide to accept it is to develop that massive income by building a complex web of links.

Stay tuned for further posts on Link Building

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogger for money – living the good life.

PS … can you say “cheese”


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