Unit 12: Introduction to Blog Directories ~ Building Your Incoming Links

Introduction:

If you want your blog articles to rank high on the search engines, one of the main tasks on your agenda is to build incoming links. These incoming links should be directed to the whole blog, as well as to the individual articles you write.

Google and other search engines have been tweaked to read and rank web pages based on traffic and buzz. Your job is to help create and stimulate that buzz. We will look at two ways to accomplish this. (There are, of course, other ways such as promoting through social media but we will discuss this topic later as a full unit.)

One way is to enter your blog into a number of blog directories on the web, and the other way is to rewrite your articles and post them on other sites and other blogs containing links pointing back to your original article.

Entering Your Blog in Blog Directories

There are numerous blog directories around the internet where you can enter your blog and its content.

Here is a list of the 32 web directories you can still count on in 2022.

Here is a short list of some of the free blog directories:

• www.google.com/business
• www.bingplaces.com
• www.business.yelp.com
• www.bbb.org

This article also lists some of the benefits of each directory. Review the list and descriptions so you are familiar with some of them.

WordPress also allows for pingbacks. Pingbacks inform bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles.

Posting Your Content on External Sources

A very effective way to get backlinks is to rewrite your article, so it sounds different but maintains its essence. For every article, it would be a good idea to write a couple of similar articles with keyword links pointing back to your original article and distribute them around on other sites on the internet.

One way of publishing your article elsewhere is to find other blogs related to your topic and get to know their administrator. Most blog owners understand the importance of having fresh content on their site. As long as it doesn’t present a conflict of interest, most will be all too happy to have another writer (i.e., you) post articles on their blog.

Another way to publish articles pointing back to your main article is to sign up to a publishing platform site such as discover.hubpages.com. HubPages can earn you money with Google AdSense, because it is highly trafficked and indexes well on search engines.

HubPages used to be particularly good, because it enabled you to publish a sister article of your original article pointing to your own blog, thereby driving traffic to your original and your domain. This, in turn, helped your original article rank higher, because it encouraged a natural traffic flow back to your site. Some years ago, however, HubPages updated its policy and will now disallow this technique if it feels that the sole purpose of your post residing on its site is for traffic flow.