If you are blogging to build links, let us face it, you are one of several-million faceless generic bloggers out there. You are just one sheep in a massive flock that is crawling on the face of a huge globe called the Internet and wandering around aimlessly, stuck in the middle of this sea of undifferentiated generic mess of blogs. That is a bad place to be. Link building in SEO, as you are well aware, is going through massive transitions now. Old link building tricks of mass blasting, using automated software and sending out massive amounts of link spam are no longer going to cut it. As Eric Schmidt of Google keeps harping time and time again, Google is all about branding. He is not just wasting his time releasing these statements. He is saying something. What he is saying is that there will come a time that Google will rank brands only. It is going to be a dark day, the apocalypse of the golden age of web spam when just some nobody from any corner of the world can put up pages based on low-competition keywords with decent search volume and blast links to them and laugh all the way to the bank because of advertising revenue. Those days are effectively over if you read between the lines of what Schmidt has been saying. The golden key, of course, is branding and as most of the previous blog posts written have dealt with branding based on content. Link building requires branding as well. That is the real secret with the new SEO–how to build links with branding in mind.
Links with Personality
Usually when most SEO professionals think about link building, they look at it as an exercise that has no personality. It is all about just firing up the latest and greatest link building software and just blasting tons of pages, spam pages all over the Internet and then randomize them and then having them hit a target website. That is not brand-conscious link building. If Schmidt walks his talk, those spam link days are soon going to be over. Link building requires personality because brands require personality. When you are at a blog that is related to the website that you are trying to promote and you are going to put together a comment, you have to emphasize your personality. It is not just a question of you leaving a keyword-anchored text hyper linked to the web page you are trying to optimize. It is way more than that. It is all about interacting with other blogs so that they feel that they have a vested interest in your success. In essence, it is all about your website becoming a part of the larger category of interests and issues that your blog or website is supposed to be surround by. Think of personality-driven link building this way: If you move into a new neighborhood and you do not know anybody else and you just shut yourself up in your house and do not go outside and say hello to your neighbors, there is no community connection to you. Somebody who is looking for you might have a tough time finding you if your neighbors do not know you. The same with search engines. If your neighboring websites do not know you, they will not link to you and that is the end of the story. Google will not find you. You will not rank highly for the key term that you are targeting. Spammers get around this by just building tons of backlinks using automated tools through pages that link to you. These are junk pages and they think that this does the job. The best way for people to find you is through your community and that is where personality comes in. When you become a personal brand in the blog community that deals in your particular website or blog’s category, people would have a relationship with you. People would know your brand and people would know what you are all about. Not only will they link to you, but they will also vouch for you. You have become a member of the community. That is why it is very important for your personality to shine out when you are doing link building.
Personality-Based Link Building Tips
It all boils down to letting your personality shine. If you are linking to another blog to establish a relationship, write a very personality-driven blog post by saying “I” many times and expressing your opinion a lot and also highlighting internal links in your blog. You are pushing your personality forward and your blog is piggybacking on your personal brand. If you are leaving blog comments on related blogs, the same dynamic applies. Take five minutes to create a Gravatar profile and link a picture to your E-mail. You will be surprised that wherever you are in the small blog community surrounding your product category or website category, people will start to equate a certain type of opinion, a certain writing style and a certain view point with your picture and your website. Those are not necessarily bad things. In fact, you should aim to do that because it sets you apart from the 99.9% of the blog sheep out there. They are content with simply doing what everybody else is doing and getting rewarded with crap results. That is not the way to go with blogging. It is all about personality and that is not the way to go with SEO nowadays with Google talking about brands as it does. It is all about putting your personality out there. If you do not want to brand your personality, brand your sites. Invest a couple of bucks on fiverr.com for a logo or an avatar and use that for Gravatar. The key is to set yourself apart from other people that are building backlinks. When you are commenting, make sure that you really engage the owner of the blog that you are commenting on. Engage them in a conversation. Avoid the “hit it and quit it” mentality of many link builders of just dropping a link and zooming off somewhere else. It does not work that way. It is all about blog relationships and site relationships and, therefore, you end up building your brand.
Another key element to personality-based link building is to always pay more attention to “about the author” sections of the articles you write to build back links. This is not an afterthought. This is about branding. That space can push your business forward or it can retard your business. Spend a few minutes coming up with a compelling “about the author” section. Make your personality stand out. Make the reader realize that there is a real person behind this article, a real person that they might want to follow. Put your Twitter feed up there so that they can follow you and follow how you think.
The Bottom Line
Believe it or not, link building is not an impersonal act. It is a branding opportunity. Do not waste that opportunity because there are many people that are looking to follow credible, authoritative people in the content niches that you are covering. Do not waste that opportunity by appearing to be just part of the 99.9% blogging or site building sheep that are out there. You are not a sheep. You are a human being with a real personality. Act like it.
This guest post was written by Chris Walker, a new generation blogger for MarketingCopyExpert.Com, the Internet’s leading supplier of personality-based links. Get more information regarding their services at http://www.marketingcopyexpert.com