SEO TIPS: Blogging – Is It For You?

Every webmaster wants to increase the visibility of their site and/or blog. It's a necessity that you constantly grow broaden your audience. Aside from optimized content, getting others to link to your blog is the key to increasing your blog’s ranking, popularity, and visibility. What's the best way to go about it though?

One of the big reasons anyone spends time blogging is in the hope of getting some decent links to your blog. Not all bloggers enjoy equal success, some flat out suck at it and should probably give up or hire someone. You can spend several hours thinking about an interesting blog post and do extensive research to provide your readers with excellent content. But despite making a brilliant post, you may not get anyone link to your blog posts which means you wasted your time and effort for the most part. This can be discouraging and frustrating. You find yourself asking, “What am I doing wrong? What is wrong with my post? Why won’t anyone link to me?” If you ask yourself those questions, you need help.

When people are being honest, most bloggers share the same plight, which indicates that something more than just good content is required. When you have good content those who visit your blog will enjoy your post but they may not necessarily link to your blog. You need to be connected to the right network that will link to your blog post. You need to be connected to the ‘sharers’. This is where it all gets tricky and takes many bloggers into a world they really don't understand.

The first thing that you should do is to share your blog with your friends and encourage them to link to you. This is an easy little boost, but after awhile they likely will get tired of your asking them over and over.  You can also start an opt-in email list to get people link to your posts. It is not enough to get your friends link to you as this is a very limited approach. You need t

o get the attention of other bloggers and get them to link to you to attain a higher level of visibility. If you get links from popular bloggers your traffic and links can increase because the blogs of popular bloggers will be getting good visitor traffic and links. You can basically piggyback off of their following. This is good, but again, you can't always depend on others to go all of your promotion for you.

What you need to do is become a known quantity in your own right. This is time consuming and  requires planning, starting with finding the best blogs in your niche industry and growing out from that.  The first step is to become actively engaged by leaving feedback and comments on  blogs, making sure that you are genuine in all your commenting and feedback. Just leaving lame comments of little relevance doesn't work. Seasoned bloggers will be able to make out immediately that you are scavenging for links and that you are not genuine, so BE genuine and appreciate their blog. It's not worth saving a couple minutes if all you'll get is a reputation as a spammer.

Something else you can do to increase your visibility is volunteer to write posts for relevant blogs. All these should happen in the preparation stage before you actually start posting in your own blog. That doesn't always work out that and some would say it's a bit backward, but in general, guest post whenever it is relevant and you can. Once people in your niche circle get to know you, you can start inviting them to view your blog posts. This will increase the chances of getting links for your blog posts.

There is no denying that this is a slow procedure and there are faster ways of getting links for your website. However, you should not totally disregard blogging as blogging efforts will not only help you get some good links but it will also keep your website’s content fresh for the search engine bots. That is a major factor to stick with it. A blog is more than just content, or just links, or just a traffic driver. You can utilize your blog in more ways than just one. The key is figuring out what you reasonably can do and then doing it well.