Backlinks Ideas: Blogging

You may note the previous post featured backlinks to some eHow articles. Writing your own blog is one way to get some blacklinks going. You can legitimately link to your own articles.

A blog or website can also be a convenient place to keep an "index" of your articles to refer people to. Many eHowers maintain a website which has a page just for this purpose. You can cluster articles of a certain subject into a single page or group and make it easier for readers to find more articles of the same kind by you. You can also announce your articles, or provide an RSS feed to these announcements.

However, these kinds of backlinks won't give you the quality points that I mentioned in the "What is a Backlink" post. Pages that have a whole lot of links but not a lot of text look suspicious to Google's bots - especially if there seems to be a pattern of linking among a couple of sites. Like, say, you have five blogs and they are each full of links to each other and to your eHow articles. That's what would be called a "link farm" and Google considers it to be spamming their search engines, and if you do it too much, they may blacklist your ehow pages, and put your blogs in the sandbox.

Google, however, can tell the difference between a legitimate index and a "spamdex", so don't be afraid to create an individual blog or website to act as an index for you. Think more of the readers and less of the search engines, and odds are you will do the kinds of things Google is looking for - group the articles by relevance, add notes about them if you think it would be useful to the readers.

The better way you can use a blog, though, takes more work. If you have a subject that you write on a lot, then why not start a blog on that subject? You can use it for several purposes: one is to announce your latest articles on the subject, but even better is if you get ideas for articles that aren't how tos, you have a place to put them - and you can link back to your eHow articles. Such a blog, of course, can potentially make you some money too. You won't have the rank of eHow, but if you create a quality site, it will eventually get the traffic you need to start making a little side money, while improving the ranking of your eHow articles.

However, this works best if your blog has an overall subject that matches the subject of your eHow articles. The backlinks in my last post will get a little boost because the post is relevant to the links, but this blog is not about parenting or a summer activities. That whole article would mean more on a parenting blog.

I'll talk about more ways to sew your own backlinks soon.

The Backlinks Series:
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks - blogging
Backlinks - signature files
Backlinks - commenting