Andy Coates Blog

There is much written about linking in the blogosphere and how it is important for your blogs wellbeing to get good healthy links from relevant sites. Having lots of good inbound links to your site works to your advantage in several ways, here is a short list below.

• Inbound links from articles on relevant sites will deliver targeted traffic.
• Inbound links create more ways for the Googlebot to reach your site.
• Inbound links (with good anchor text) can help search engines find your site in relevant searches.
• Inbound links are the carrier of PageRank juice!
• Inbound links count toward your Technorati rating.

These are all important points to remember when building you blog as links are in effect the deciding factor of popularity and relevance with many search engines. Traffic from search engines is generally called targeted traffic as (hopefully) depending on what the user has searched for , they should be presented with a list of relevant websites to what their search query was. If the person searching found your website/blog relevant and useful they may link back to you if they have a blog or a site of their own, this is know as organic growth . As you can see from this short example, over the long term the basis of growing you blog organically starts with other sites linking to your blog.

DEEP LINKING

This is where deep linking come into practice, many people when requesting links, or leaving comments link directly to the front page of their site. This isn't a bad think and should be carried on as generally the front page of any site is usually the most important. To make you blog much more attractive to Google and other search engines you should be deep linking, by this I mean linking to specific, relevant pages inside your blog. For example if you agreed to exchange links with a site about cooking and you blog only has one post on cooking you should link to that. Alternatively when leaving comments on other peoples blogs, instead of using the address of your front page www.yoursite.com why not use that URL field to link back to an internal but relevant post on your site. This will be of more value to the reader if they visit your site through your link in a comment.

You could take this one step further and use relevant anchor text instead of your name in your comments but I wouldn't advise doing this as you will probably end up pissing of the author and may get labeled as spam, so beware!