4 Great Tips to Build More Links to Your Blog Posts…Based on Scientific Analysis

This is a guest post by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella. It contains data from his upcoming webinar “The Science of Blogging” taking place on December 9th.

Many marketers and small business owners see blogging, rightly, as an important aspect of their SEO efforts because of their ability to attract inbound links. And even beyond SEO, getting lots of links for your blog posts is key to establishing yourself as an expert and building traffic.

I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on over 150,000 blog posts and I’ve identified several ways you can optimize your blogging efforts to drive more incoming links.

Day of Week

I found that blog post published in the early and mid business week tended to attract more links than articles published on other days. This is likely because the “linkerati” (people who control and create links, like bloggers) tend to spend the most time working on their sites during the week, as opposed to on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Time of Day

When I turned my analysis towards the hour of publishing, I found that blog posts published very early in the morning (like, 7AM early) attracted many more links than articles posted at other times during the day. This is because most linkerati are looking at their inboxes and feedreaders in the morning to find interesting content to write about and link to.

Most Linked-To Words

When I studied the words that occured in blog post and how they correlated with incoming links, I found words like “recent” and “soon” that indicated linkers were interested in writing about timely content. I also found many words like “insights,” “analysis,” and “review” that told me people were interested in linking to content that expressed a blogger’s personal and unique point-of-view.

Least Linked-To Words

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Google Updates and Other SEO News

Nothing ever stays the same very long on the Internet and that’s especially true when you’re dealing with Google. Now since that’s the primary search engine it’s also the one most people involved with search engine optimization need to concern themselves with so when the Head Googlers recently made the announcement they’d come out with a URL shortener, goo.gl, it raised a few preliminary red flags among people whose big concern is seo.

Google’s Matt Cutts has gone out of his way to put everyone at ease by pointing to things like the fact the shortener uses a method to redirect links that could be good for social media users and actually point to benefits for your website. If you’re anything like me your ears perk up when you hear any steps Google is taking to increase the efficiency of links because they are the bread-and-butter of any good search engine optimization campaign along with keywords.

Goo.gl could also play a part with the ranking algorithm the site uses and work its way into search results if the whole technique becomes popular. That’s the thing  everyone who works with seo knows—its parameters are constantly changing and that means you need to keep on top of all these changes so you can supply rankings and traffic that  provide your clients with what they need in the way of hits.

Some experts are predicting the results could be similar to Facebook’s Like button in that there will be some demographic information passed along when users are signed into their accounts.

Of course with the rise of social media people are beginning to wonder how seo will fare and although many pundits were first calling for the burial of search engine optimization with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, there now seems to be more of a conciliatory attitude with many professionals calling for a combined effort between the two.

Of course it stands to reason when you consider a good website that is search engine optimized is always the basis for any business and any of the social media campaigns you undergo will always point back to the same starting point. Through it all, there has never been any call for discarding good content or scrapping keywords and links.

In another bit of news, it’s now even predicted that mobile SEO platforms will become more important than the ones used on laptops or even PCs. Some of the people who know are even predicting a resurgence in things like pay per click advertising on the mobile web with the number of smart phones that are now in use.

Remember too that another report is stating Internet marketers are looking toward making link building their priority in the next twelve months and that means the need for well written content to couch these links will grow in the near future….again.

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Three Reasons You Need Search Engine Optimization

More and more people are asking what search engine optimization is and what it’s all about. People who have websites either for Internet-based businesses or personal reasons all seem to understand that looking into search engine optimization as it’s called is a good idea, but not everyone seems to understand why.

Simply put, people all know how a well-built home is a good investment although only very few know how to build one properly.

It’s the same with search engine optimization; the sometimes complicated and ever-changing mathematical algorithms Google uses to rank the pages that fit any search description are encrypted and tucked away from all but the most savvy tech people, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few simple ideas that simplify the process so that business owners and recreational users alike understand why they need to hire the professionals who implement this technique.

1)      Getting great business cards made up with just the right wording and graphics are all fine and well, but leaving them in the box they came in from the printer won’t get you any results. Having a professional website put together and just leaving it to its own devices on the web is the same idea. You need to work with the right content writer who understands how to use seo to alert the search engines every time someone searches for your goods and services. That’s the crux of how you get a better page ranking.

2)       Seo is constantly changing to suit the changing web landscape. One of the biggest requirements is fresh content. You need to be sure that you’ve got a steady stream that alerts the search engines because they all look for fresh content and that’s the domain of the professional content writer because these experts keep on top of the tools of the trade like keyword placement and where the links go so you get the best results. Besides, most people don’t have the time to keep up with those demanding requirements.

3)      Search engine optimization is not trendy. Unlike social media and even the latest trend toward using videos as a method to get some exposure, seo is like an anchor for all those other techniques because it deals directly with the frontlines in the Internet marketing battle—the message on your website. Regardless of whether you use the limited characters on Twitter or even Facebook, everything is pointing back to the foundation of your message which is the search engine optimized content on your website.

Sometimes when people see the leading words and phrases that light up and take you to another web page, they don’t always understand those conveniences are really part of the bigger search engine optimization picture and part of the researched and carefully laid out plans of a content writer that understands how to work these keywords and links to your best benefit.

When all is said and done, you need search engine optimization so that your website will get noticed and be able to compete on the web.

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