The Tlog - a technology blog

(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)

As I’ve mentioned before, having people (in blogs and other sites) linking to your blog is a Good Thing ™. Not only does it improve your ranking in Google (and other search engines)’s search results, but people may arrive at your blog through those links. Accordingly, if something can be done to cause more people to link to you, you should do it.

There are several things you can do, of course. You can ask people to link to you, for instance - either by asking your friends for a link, or by asking total strangers to exchange links (I’ll deal with the latter in a future part of the series). You can also simply write good content, and promote your blog in terms of SEO, pinging, and such, and wait for people to link to your blog, or to particular posts. It will happen. But it’s slow, and uncontrolled.

Hence the concept of “linkbaiting“, which is the art of writing posts that have increased chances of having people link to them.

Linkbaiting methods include:

• create helpful guides. People love linking to guides: “I just found a nice guide to…”.
• create lists. People love these even more. “10 ways to make better cheese dip”, or “12 tips for improving your Windows system”, or “A checklist for new blogs”, etc… you get the idea. These ones also tend to get a lot of del.icio.us and/or Digg links.
• create self-sufficient posts. People will very rarely link to part 13 of your series, or to a post which depends on the one before, and is continued in the next one. Remember, that post should be accessible to people who don’t read your blog.
• use good, self-explanatory titles. People usually skim through the post titles, and only read more if a title grabs their interest. Obviously, a post called “8 essential apps for Series 60 phones” is much more attractive than a post whose title is “my mobile phone experiences”, even if the content is exactly the same.
• index pages for series also work well.
• if appropriate, create something. A piece of software, a WordPress plugin, a song, a Flash animation, etc.. The post in which you “release” that creation of yours will probably attract a lot of links.
• last but certainly not least, write good posts! I shouldn’t even need to say this, of course.

Note that I’m not suggesting that you do the above (except for the good titles / good posts parts, which are always a good idea) for every single one of your posts! In other words, I’m not saying that all of your posts should be self-sufficient and not refer to any other, that they should all be guides or lists, and so on. These are the linkbaits - the ones you use so that a lot of people link to them, and, therefore, to your blog - improving your PageRank, and getting you new visitors. But, in most cases, they won’t be the “meat” of your blog.

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Related posts:

1. Optimizing page titles in blogs
2. Blogging tips #19: have a “top posts” page
3. Blogging tips #9.5: separate your posts in time
4. Blogging tips #22: keeping first-time visitors on your blog: Methods
5. Blogging tips #4: Making your blog search engine-friendly