The way Search Engines index your blog is by sending “robot” crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Here we discuss how linking both inside and outside your blogs can help you with search engine optimization.

Part 2 of 4: Linking Strategy

Get Inbound Links
Every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site. The best inbound links? These are from higher ranked sites than your own, that are relevant to the topic you are writing about, and who link to you using relevant keywords. Find them and try to get them to link to you.

Use Outbound Links
Linking out to quality relevant sites that your readers might find useful can also help search engines index your site. While this can be an effective strategy, remember to weigh this against the fact that this may end up sending some traffic away from your blog.

Also keep in mind, too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Above all, don’t forget to link to only reputable and relevant sites.

Interlink Your Site
Make it easier for those robots to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. You can do this simply by providing some sort of a site map or listing your blog’s categories in your sidebar.

Further, make sure every page or post links back to your main page and/or any other important pages on your site with an intuitive navigation scheme. Note by highlighting them this way, they can become some of the most highly ranked pages simply because they are linked on every page of your blog.

Finally, consider linking to older posts (or use the ‘other relevant posts’ feature) to point readers to a topic you’ve previously written about before.

Buy Links
Some professional webmasters purchase links from other highly ranked and relevant sites. If you have the budget, you may want to consider this as part of your linking strategy.

Bottom Line
In sum, think about your links as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

Next up, we’ll have Part 3: Site Submission Techniques. And don’t forget to see Part 1: Quality Content.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.