The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog.

By: Tejwinder Singh Rai
 
In Part 1 of this series we optimized your blog to rank well for search results of certain keywords that we inserted into your blog. This is called on-page optimization. Onpage optimization affects your ranking in only very minor ways. However, you do not want to skip it. Every little bit helps when you are competing for search engine rankings! 


Now, we are moving to off-page search engine optimization. These are factors that are not inserted into your blog but affect your search engine rankings greatly. There are many off-page factors. I will cover the major ones in this article. 

The first and most obvious one is the number of links to your blog. These are links that point back to your blog from other locations/web sites on the web. 

As a general rule of thumb, the more links to your blog, the more the search engines think you are an authority in that particular niche and hence the higher they rank you. However, take care to observe the quality of the links. 

For example, keeping to our theme of technological gadgets, a thousand links from totally irrelevant sites like online dating sites, when you have a tech blog, would not help at all because your blog is a technological product blog. In contrast, a single link from a highly authoritative site about technological gadgets will get the search engines crawling about your blog like S.W.A.T. storming a math lab. 

Anyway, the most cost effective way of getting high quality links from authoritative sites is simply to ask for them. If your blog contains high quality content that is original and will provide valuable information, for more detail visit www.bloggers-guide-to-profit.com chances are the webmaster of the site you want to get a backlinks from will link to your blog to get the information you are providing. 

How should you ask these web masters of authority to link to your blog? Only apply this technique if your blog is really content rich and offers high quality information. No webmaster will link to you if all you are offering are reprints of articles not written by you. They want original content, written by you! Here's how. 

First, look for the top sites in your niche. Simply search the major search engines for the term that your are targeting. In this case, for more detail visit www.building-blog-empire.com does a search for "technological gadgets". The first few results will likely be commercial sites. Ignore those because we are looking only for community-based sites and other blogs that are more accessible to a complete newcomer like you. Besides, the major commercial sites likely will not link to your small blog anyway. When I searched I found Gizmodo.com. It would be a good option for our example. 

You do not want hundreds of links overnight. This will be seen as spam and you know what happens, right? La-La Land for your blog! 

If you were actually editing a technological gadgets site, you would compose an email to the webmaster of Gizmodo.com (whose email address you can find on the site). 

Start by stating how you came across their site, i.e., "looking for gadget information, I came across your site". Do NOT say "looking for link partners."! 

Tell them how you think their site provides valuable info. Basically, try to say something really nice about their site. Take some time and look over their site and maybe make a comment on a particular article or feature that you like and you think your readers might like it too. 

 

About the Author

www.your-own-blog.com www.blog-and-ping.com 

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