I promote pages that link to me
It’s a well known fact amongst people who really understand SEO that not all links are equal. Just because you get a link from the New York Times doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax. Really clever SEO types will promote the page on the New York Times that links to them and turn it from a great link into an amazing link.
For example if one of my blog posts gets a link from Engadget I will make sure that the Engadget blog post is submitted to Digg, StumbleUpon and other appropriate social news sites. Very often the reputation Engadget has will propel it to the Digg front page when the original story has been buried (tip: don’t submit the Engadget one too soon).
So, next time you are thinking who you should link to, make sure it’s somebody like me who will spend the time to drive as much traffic to your post as possible.
You might get a link back
With so many blogs to read every day the posts that really stand out are the ones with great writing, nice formatting and a link to BlogStorm somewhere in the content. Like most bloggers gaining a nice link makes me happy and grateful.
This feeling of gratitude also make me much more likely to link to you in the future because I feel I owe you a link.
Take my list of the Top UK blogs as an example. Most of the bloggers on the list have read it and are pleased to be listed. A number of them have linked to me but quite a lot haven’t, you can bet that some of them might drop me a link in the future though.
Your readers will be happy
OK, I know BlogStorm is growing quite nicely but it still has a long way to go before we overtake the likes of ProBlogger, and SEOmoz. If your blog about internet marketing has 500 readers you can bet they all read the top blogs so why would you point a post out to your readers when 99% of them have already read it somewhere else?
Next time you wan to drop somebody a link try to make it to a smaller blog that your readers might not know about. You can bet that your readers will appreciate it and the blogger will be very grateful.
I will subscribe to your feed
This doesn’t apply to everybody who links to me but in most cases if your post is a good one and it sends me a nice amount of traffic I will probably subscribe to your RSS feed.
Linking to me gets my attention and makes me read the post just to check what it’s about. I don’t read many posts from the beginning to the end so make the post a good one and I will probably want to read more from your blog.
Google might like you better
Linking out to bad neighbourhoods can harm your rankings on Google. Next time you decide to link to a blogger check out their rankings for a few terms such as their name and page title tags. Rand Fishkin famously only links to John Chow with a nofollow tag because John has suffered a Google penalty.
Next time you want to drop somebody a link make it a blogger that doesn’t break Google’s guidelines, it might just help improve your rankings.
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