Although optimizing your blog’s content for search engines seems to be a more attractive way to improve its SEO since it is under your complete control, backlinks are the backbone to your websites’ SEO success. While it is true that you have limited control over backlinks, they not only help you to bring in traffic but also help you out tremendously with your Google page rank. More so than custom tailoring your content.

1. Linking To Others – When you write an article and link to another blogger’s blog without expecting anything in return (of course you at least notify them of what you’ve done), the chances of them linking to you when they see you have good content are very high. People appreciate generosity.
2. Article Directories – Submitting  your written work to sites like Ezine Articles and Go Articles can rapidly increase your back link count.
3. Forum Posting – You need to be careful with this one and try to keep you links on topic. Many forums have an off-topic area where people may discuss anything they like. Use this to promote your content if your blog is not related to the forum. If it is, well then bring your links up in regular conversation within the targeted forum areas.
4. Listing In Blog And Site Directories – Another free way to get the word out there. Requires a lot of work to manually add yourself into the myriad of directories out there however in the long run it is worth the effort. Yahoo and DMOZ are popular ones.
5. Joining Up With An Affiliate Program – Great but expensive way to build backlinks.
6. Content Exchange – Many sites are hungry for content and do not want to write it on their own. If you were to offer your RSS feed to them and allow them to publish your articles, you would get a link in return plus residual traffic.
7. Link Baiting – If you have a high profile website that everybody would like to be exposed on, put an offer out there for them to write a review on their blog of your blog in return for a backlink. Most bloggers cannot resist an offer like this and will likely pull the trigger.
8. Writing Great Content – This should be the kingpin of you backlinking success. It is the natural way to build backlinks and frankly, without good content, you don’t have a website. How it happens is that eventually other bloggers (with similar blogs) will see your fantastic content and will end up linking to it on their blogs since it is considered noteworthy.
9. Visit Other Blogs – Go check out other blogs within your niche. Read their posts and write a couple of good comments. Comments are great because not only does the blog owner notice you but your name is also hyperlinked in the comments section. I have had many people come to my site this way from other blogs.
10. Exposure – Get your articles on every social networking and bookmarking sites possible.
11. News Releases – Definitely not an everyday backlinking technique. Send out a press release to other related blog owners anytime you have something new and big happening on your own blog.

How Not To Get Backlinks

Just be aware though that not all backlinks are good as being affiliated with “link farms” can harm your reputation in the eyes of Google. This is why I generally steer clear of link exchange programs. Also, keep an eye on your inbound/outbound link ratio. Try not to let your outbound links outnumber your inbound links.

Every car review that I write I like to post an array of photos in a gallery format at the bottom of the article. Not to mention a main photo at the top for front page purposes. But they are not just any old photos!

I try to find (usually from the manufacturer’s site) the best quality photos I can get my hands on – even if it means doing it the hard way and taking a screenshot, then later editing the photo in Photoshop. I do advise to first read the websites’ TOS first just to double check the distribution rights of the graphic property.

So when I edit the photos in Photoshop, I try to first of all keep them at a size that people would normally like to download and not have to edit. That means not too big and not too small. Secondly, sticking to the editing theme, crop the photos so that they look attractive. There is nothing I hate worse when searching for images on Google than a photo with the bottom half of the image chopped off and the top part has a ton of dead space. I am sure a lot of you feel the same way. You like to come across a perfectly edited image and download it with no hassles afterwards. Lastly, and maybe the most important thing to consider is naming the image. Name it something that you think people looking for that certain image would type into Google to find it.

If you are not blogging about a topic that requires a lot of photos, my suggestion would be to try adding a photo gallery on your blog with photos that interest you and are hopefully somewhat related to your topic.

Making presumably relevant comments on other blogs which are tagged as “no follow” will not help your sites’ page rank since there will be no page rank juice passed onto your site. That doesn’t mean that this certain technique is a waste of time though. There is something you can do to circumvent this problem.

Of course, when you go to post a comment, you can enter the URL of you websites link. Do NOT use the URL of your homepage! Instead, enter the URL of a specific, relevant and useful page from your website. This is also called a “deep link”.

By doing this you will be exposing your pages related material to the other people visiting the .edu blog. This will likely grab the attention of the .edu blogger and their visitors.  What will happen next is that those University students and bloggers will hopefully write an article about your post on their blogs if it’s worth blogging about. When they do this and use your provided deep link in their post, the link will NOT utilize a “no follow” tag gaining you a non-reciprocal direct link to an internal page within your blog.

Take a URL from one of my blogs’ posts for example: http://monetizezone.com/?p=102. Google’s search engine does not immediately understand what that is. It will need to spend time crawling the content of the post to figure out what exactly it is. This URL suffix is only a dynamically generated sequential number formed by Wordpress and is Wordpress specific.

On the contrary, compare that to this SEO friendly URL for the identical page: http://monetizezone.com/how-to-attract-comments-on-your-blog/. A URL like this immediately enables Google to determine exactly what your page content is about in turn giving your page URL a far greater chance of appearing within the search engine results.

How To Enable This Wordpress Feature

First of all, log into your Wordpress account and you will see the “Settings” column on the left hand side. Under “Settings” click on “Permalinks”. Now you will see a screen which contains the common settings. Click on the little circle beside “Custom Structure” and copy/paste in this piece of text: /%postname%/.After this, click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom and you are done! What this will show is your domain name and the exact name of the post just like how you see it in the paragraph above!

When setting up your own blog there are several considerations to take into account if you have the intention of making money with it. Having your own well thought up domain name plays a large part in the popularity of your blog – not only with people but also with search engines.

The reason for having your own unique domain name is to brand yourself well. Or the other reason is to have an SEO (Search Engine Optimized) friendly domain name. The choice is yours however if you are just starting out I would personally choose the branding style domain to create an identity. An example of a branding style domain name would be www.MonetizeZone.com where is specifically describes what I am doing here. It’s a Zone that I am converting to Money. A search engine friendly domain for this topic would look something like www.howtomakemoneyonline.com where you are trying to use keywords. Try to keep your domain name down under 30 characters and no more than 3 words in it.

Most of the good domain names these days are of course taken. There are though a lot of expiring names everyday so check out a site like http://www.justdropped.com/ that can notify you via email of domain names that are dropping 24 hrs before they actually do.

I use Omnis both as my domain name registrar and web site host. With domain hosting starting at $5.95/month and a free domain name to go along with it, it’s a no brainer to do this! Their hosting reliability is nothing short of phenomenal – I speak out of experience since I’ve been using them for over 5 years and my sites and email accounts have never been down once. Also you get unlimited disk storage and unlimited data transfer. The customer service is convenient too since they have a live chat button right on their homepage that opens a chat window with a representative who responds immediately. Give their service a try! All I can say is that Omnis has worked well for all of my hosting needs in the past and they have a very easy to use administration panel when you log in.

Finally, in my opinion the most important reason to have your own domain name is that when you approach advertisers, they take you more seriously. Honestly, www.professional.com looks a whole lot more professional than www.professional.blogspot.treehouse.rk.jp/blog/pickmynose. That domain looks like it’s possibly free and you are just blogging as a hobby or a past time and most bloggers with domains like that are just a “flash in the pan” anyways. To attract paying advertisers you need to look like your operating your blog with a reason and important mission statement behind it. A solid domain name and proper hosting is the best way to start off blogging on the right foot.