If you’re a blogger and you want backlinks, you have nothing if not choices. One choice that many bloggers seem to miss however is Q and A sites. The idea is pretty simple. All you have to do is search for questions related to your blogs niche and answer them. Provided you’re stealthy about it, nobody minds if your answer includes a backlink. And as I will now outline, such backlinks can be highly rewarding.

High Quality Backlinks

Many question and answer sites are seriously respected in the eyes of Google. They tend to have high PR and they rarely put up with spam. This means that the backlinks you build are going to be the high quality type.

Question and answer sites are also not targeted by internet marketers that much. This means that unlike article directories, you are never going to be associated with those who practice black hat SEO. In case you were unaware, Google doesn’t like that sort of thing.

Serious Direct Traffic

In case the Alexa rankings didn’t tip you off, Q and A sites get ridiculous amounts of traffic. And thanks to the fact that large portions of that traffic is made up of people looking for very specific information, you can expect your links to be clicked on, a lot. This means that backlinks built on question and answer sites tend to perform pretty fantastically in terms of direct traffic.

Long Lasting

Backlinks built on question and answer sites are capable of continuing to drive traffic to your blog for years to come. I know this because one of my blogs still gets traffic from the backlinks that I built on Yahoo Answers two years ago. The reason for this is that old questions continue to get traffic year in, year out. When you compare this to commenting on a blog post, you should be able to appreciate that such longevity is pretty rare.

Not so Tedious

Another thing I love about building backlinks on question and answer sites is that I don’t actually hate doing it. In fact, I actually enjoy spending a few hours on Quora. Provided you have a genuine interest in the niche that you blog about, you are likely to enjoy answering a few questions about it. Of course, you do come across the occasional stupid question but most are genuinely a pleasure to answer.

It Can be Inspiring

Speaking of intelligent questions, they make excellent posts. As well as being a great source of backlinks, Quora also happens to be a great source of inspiration. This means that those hours you spend trying to manipulate Google can actually be used to boost the quality of your blogs content too. Post ideas even come complete with complimentary titles in the form of the actual questions.

An Insight into Your Target Audience

If someone is asking/answering questions related to your blogs niche, chances are they are members of your blogs target audience. In a similar fashion to forums, Q and A sites are therefore very useful when it comes to keeping your finger on the pulse of what your target audience actually cares about. They also demonstrate which specific aspects of your blogs niche that people tend to have the most difficulty understanding.

Q and A Sites are Growing in Popularity

Finally, question and answer sites are here to stay. Year on year, the traffic that they receive is continuing to rise. And Quora is a perfect example of how even sites relatively new to the market can make a serious splash. If you master the art of driving traffic to your web properties with Q and A sites now, you are also getting in before the crowd. And you can expect that head start to be more and more valuable as their popularity continues to rise.

Tom Koh is an expert web analyst. He loves to write about SEO, online marketing and provides tips and tricks on how to buy quality traffic.