Are all links created equal. I don’t think so and neither do alot of other bloggers and webmasters.

So in my own way I’m going to attempt to show you the right way to create links and get traffic to your pages and blog posts.

The basic idea is this: The Search engines are like the reality show survivor. It’s a popularity contest. And your goal is to make your pages popular by getting as many links as possible.

I don’t mean just any old link. I mean Quality links and a high quantity of links.

This is and has been the debate for quite sometime. Is it quality or quantity?

I say it is both.

IF you’re blogging for money or blogging for business purposes then you have to consider your blog as a kind of magazine. As with a static website your blog has a home page then it has its inside pages or posts pages.

So you want to make sure all the people that visit your blog have access to all the great posts blog reviews or product reviews or just your awesome content easily available to them from your home page.

Theres a few great Word Press plug-ins that make this possible.

Related posts plug-in

Popular posts plug-in. Jack Humphrey has a great video about the most popular post plug-in review and all its uses

Recent comments plug-in

These are just a few of the many plug-ins.

Aside from those there are other ways to link to your blog from within your blog, this is what is known as internal linking.

And then there is linking to your blog from outside of your blog or external linking. The main thing to consider about external linking is this: one way links are better than reciprocal links. Stupid I know but thats the way the search engines run their monopoly so just abide by their archaic mindset and all will be well with your blog. I know this doesn’t exactly mimic what happens in the real world and maybe someday it will but until then thats the way it is.

“Content is king”, that’s what everyone says. And it’s true. However, content is useless if it doesn’t get read. When you’re a beginner and you’re not yet quite so known, the best thing you can do is to combine great content with good link building methods

Unless of course you’re like me and really could careless about about what google thinks. I do reciprocal link quite a bit. Its unconventional but who cares. I link to my friends blogs and they link to mine so other friends can easily find each others blogs or have them all in one place. Ok that being said.

The reason is this IP diversity. Google seems to think that if different IP addresses are linking to a blog then it must be just like the real world, or mimics what happens in the real world. And that blog must be popular so lets give it some importance.

Google seems to think that if you link to joe and joe then links to your then you MUST be trying to game their system for link popularity purposes (I’m sure some have). They see it as a link exchange for the purpose of link popularity.

SO as I said its quality and quantity of link.

Staying with the quantity links for just a of second more, Google has all kinds of filters and techno babble for how many links it likes to see pointing at a page. Some of them are published and some are not. Trial and error led me to that conclusion.

Quality Links 

Now with the quality factors

There are two basic quality factors.

The text and code of the link itself (an on page factor)

and the quality of the page that the link is coming from (an off page factor)

Heres one many don’t consider when seeking out links from out side blogs or websites.

IS the page your link is one indexed by Google? Wouldn’t be much point in having a link from a page that isn’t even in the index would it.

How do you know if the page your lin is on is indexed?

Go to google and type this: site:domainname.com Try problogger.net what you’ll see is some time frame on the results. What that means is that the google bot was there , for instance 1 hr ago. So you know that the site IS indexed and IS being crawled.

What about page rank? Theres been a TON of babbling about this lately because of a page rank slap many bloggers got recently. While it isnt all that important to focus on page rank in itself , it is important when getting links from outside your blog.

“does it really matter if your PageRank decreases and your search traffic stays the same (other than the purpose of selling links)? What you need to do is start diversifying your traffic so that you aren’t as reliant on Google. Google may convert better but it would be a terrible mistake to let your businesses faith rest solely on Google alone”

So whats a good page rank to consider when seeking out links, I’d say 4 and up. Which I am currently working on, unfortunately google doesnt update all that often. I think like every 4 months or so.

When you go to a blog or website you have to look at the page ranks of the home page and the page rank of the inner pages. I’m not saying you just seek high ranked pages to link to and or get links from but it is helpful when you are only seeking high quality links.

Now as a blogger you can take advantage of this by using trackbacks, when linking out to other bloggers. When referrencing content links from within your blog posts and YOU SHOULD BE DOING THIS kind of trackbacking often. It’s what blog are designed to do. Share information that other bloggers and readers will find useful. And the upside of this is that these other bloggers may even link to you.

Some other posts about this topic:

Off page SEO tips for your blog

3 easy tips to get one way back links from High Page rank blogs

You are what you link