How To Get Blog Traffic – Inbound Links And Anchor Text

So now you have your blog setup and published online. You have optimized several things about your blog and started writing blog content. How do you get people to find and visit you blog in a jungle that is Internet?

Inbound Links

The major thing is getting links to your blog from other websites and other blogs. In other words: getting inbound links. Google and other search engines interpret a link from some website to your blog as a vote, by that website, for your blog. If some website believes that your blog is useful enough to be linked to, Google will notice and crawl your site to see what it is about.

The way Google places significance on each link is by the Google PageRank. Each website is assigned by Google with a PageRank from 0-10, which is Google’s way of saying how important and useful the site is. So when you are just starting, your blog will be PageRank 0.

The way it works is that by getting inbound links from a reputable site (sites with a greater Google PageRank than yours are considered reputable), Google will put more significance to your site and will increase your PageRank. It is important to note that inbound links from blog sites of similar niche has far more credibility in the eyes of Google than that of unrelated sites.

So step number one is looking for links from relevant websites and blogs.

Anchor Text

Inbound links are monumental, but they must be formatted in a right way to get you the full credit with Google and other search engines. Anchor text is the words with which another site links to yours. For example look at the following link:
Google – the best search engine.
The anchor text of the link is “Google the best search engine.

Not only does the anchor text give blog readers an idea about the content of the site that is being linked to, more importantly the anchor text tells search engines what the page is about.

The traditional way of placing links is with anchor text “click here” and that doesn’t tell much neither to the visitor nor Google and should be avoided. Anchor text must be informative and must include keywords about the content of the site you link to.

So start surfing online for relevant pages to yours, and try getting them to link to your blog with informative anchor text. That is the first step to getting the visitors and traffic to your blog.