Besides blog comments and forum posts you can build your own little linking empire. To do that you can use several free blogging and page building services that are free of charge. We will be looking at services such as:
- Google Sites
- Blogger (
blogspot.comdomains) - Squidoo
- HubPages
- WordPress
WordPress is the big one when it comes to creating highly relevant incoming links that will perform well in the search engines. We will be looking into WordPress in depth rather than the other services.
Remember, we are building links that themselves need to score well in the search engine results to get the most benefit from our work. So, how much work does it take and how difficult is it to work with those services to create good ranking results that will benefit your site in the long run?
If you have a Google account, go to your account page and look for Sites. Click on the Create site button and start building your pages. A sitemap is created directly and if you want to edit your page, use the Edit page button on the top righthand corner of your screen. In my case I got a nice URL, http://sites.google.com/site/landscapegardening/, to work with. Next to the edit page button is a drop-down menu named More actions, where you can select Manage site to change your theme and other settings later.
On this mini site you need to write some good quality content, that is also on topic, for your main site. Using these pages and the sidebar you can create links with your targeted keywords to link back to your main web site.
Blogger is also a free service from Google. It will give you a URL that ends in .blogspot.com unless you host on a subdomain of your main site. However, in this case you are building links outside your domain, so the links will end with blogspot.com.
Again, if you are logged in to your Google account you will see the service Blogger on your account page. If you haven't used it before, click on the line that says try something new and choose it from there. If you click on it you go to blogger.com where you need to sign in with your Google mail (Gmail) account.
Once you are logged in, there is a three step track to get you blogging:
- Sign up with Blogger: Accept the terms and set your screen name.
- Name your blog: Give it a title and check if the URL you want is available. You might need to be somewhat creative here, as there are already a lot of blogspot sites around.
- Choose a Theme: You can change it later if you don't like the colors or layout.
Tip
Try using "— " between the keywords you want to use, if the name you want for your blog is taken.
Start blogging!
On a blog, you don't build a web site like you do with Joomla! it is just publishing posts that will show up in a top to bottom list starting with the most recent post. With Blogger you can also create trackbacks and links to your web site, again with the main keywords or a variation as the link text.
Depending on how much competition you are facing in the search engine results pages you may need to create several posts to be noticed. If you want to spend some money to use a better domain name than yoursitename.blogspot.com, then I suggest you pay for the option to switch to a custom domain. You could also choose to refer it to the subdomain of your site. For better value to building incoming links it is recommended to use a separate domain. This option will change the URL's to a .com or other domain name, but you still use Blogger to write and post your articles.
The custom domain will costs you approximately 10 USD per year (at the time of writing) and will give you more credibility than a .blogspot.com site.
On squidoo.com you don't blog or create pages, you build a Lens. A Squidoo lens is one big page where you can put in all your knowledge about the topic of your interest. For example, you can write text, embed videos, and embed RSS Feeds from your Blogspot or WordPress blog, so you only have to write things once and the lens will be updated automatically. Your Squidoo lens is built using modules that contain the content you want to publish. Creating a lens is not that difficult. Just follow the steps mentioned next:
- Log in to Squidoo and click the button Create a Lens!.
- Once you have done that, write the topic of your lens (What is your lens about).
- What is the goal of your lens, here you can choose from four options. I suggest to start with the standard easy one.
- Set the URL of your lens and the category.
- Tag your lens with the most important keywords and fill in the security word.
Now you are done! Start working on the lens, and don't forget to include the link to your web site.
A hubpage works the same way as a Squidoo lens. You create an account and start your first Hub. If you have set the basic title for your article the URL is taken from that title. In the next step you will get a warning about what you should not do on HubPages and a single line about What Works.
The next screen before you get your first Hub is a security screen to prevent automatic creation of Hubs. Now start building that Hub page and take your time to do it, write quality content about your topic, and make use of elements such as images to break the page.
Tip
Create valid Hubs, otherwise they will not be given the power that you want them to have. HubPages has a system in place that will flag your Hub as over promotional or/and substandard.
Hubs are built with building blocks called capsules. On the righthand side you see an overview of all the different kind of capsules you can use, as shown in the following screenshot:
Naturally, you want to keep these capsules in mind as again there is a possibility to embed an RSS Feed. You should add the RSS Feed from your Joomla! web site to your Hub, in order to ensure fresh content every time you update your web pages.
As I mentioned before, WordPress is the biggest scoring free service that you can use. It is also the only one that doesn't allow you to spam their system and use it just for promotional actions. All the other services mentioned earlier allow you to monetize your blog or web site. Some share a portion of their revenue as well. So, if you want to make some money on the side, these services will provide you with the possibility to do so.
WordPress doesn't allow you to build blogs just for Search Engine Optimization and I quote:
We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for Search Engine Optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them. So if that's what you're interested in, WordPress is not for you. A self-hosted solution would be much more appropriate for you; suitable hosts can be found at http://www.wordpress.org/hosting..
Also see the following text taken from http://support.wordpress.com/advertising:
This might be just one of the reasons that Google loves WORDPRESS.COM blogs. So how is it possible to use WORDPRESS.COM to promote your website? Actually, you don't. On this service you are not going the promote your site in a way that you can do on the other services. On WORDPRESS.COM you truly build a blog or site containing pages with true value to the visitors of that blog. You can create an About page where you put a link to your main website and in that way show the readers where to get more information. You can also put a link to your website in the link section (Blogroll) together with a few other relevant links that contain valid information.
If you cannot promote your web site in a big way then what is the point of creating a blog on WORDPRESS.COM? A blog on WordPress can rank highly for the topic that you are blogging about and will give you some SEO love through those rankings. What is more important is the fact that you can take a special topic from your main web site's topic and create a blog around that.
If you write your blog posts well and start to rank on that topic you will be seen as an authority on that topic and people will want to know more about you. That is the main reason to invest time to blog on WORDPRESS.COM to be recognized as an authority in your field of expertise. As you took only one topic out of all the topics that your site is about, you can do it again for another topic as well.
You could also see these blogs as a collection of topic silos that create an array of highly related web sites that point to yours. This kind of link building takes time, and a lot of it! Is it worth it? Yes most certainly, and in more ways than one.
With blogging you can achieve the following:
- An authority status if you do it right
- More traffic to your web site
- Better rankings in the search engines
- More insight into what the visitors of your web site are looking for
- To interact with other people having interest in the same topic as you
- Fun in writing and that will reflect on your site as you want to create more content on that site as well
There is also a downside that you have to consider—it takes time away from building content on your main site and you have to cover more locations to maintain in the beginning. If you use that blog to write some timeless quality content on a niche part of your main site you will find out that you can stop maintaining those blogs after a short period of time. Remember, these are valid blogs to build incoming links to your main site!
Creating a blog on WordPress is also very simple, go to WORDPRESS.COM and get a blog. Wait! Don't go yet! You need a few guidelines to start.
- Your initial user account name is going to be the first part of your URL, so name it right and remember, you cannot use a "-" in your username. My first account was
seo4joomlaso what I got was seo4joomla.wordpress.com. When you are logged in to WORDPRESS.COM and you type in the URL with a new keyword that you want (if it is not taken); you will get the option to add that blog to your account so that you can manage all of your WordPress.COM blogs from one place. - Think about the title of your blog, if you want to change it later you can do that in the settings panel.
- Once you have your new blog, start cleaning.
- Delete the sample post and the comment along with it.
- Delete all the links in the blogroll (unless you are going to write about WordPress).
- Change the base post category from Uncategorized to a relevant topic name.
- Change the name of the links category from Blogroll to your most relevant keyword.
- Delete the About page and create a new one with the keywords of your blog in the title. That way your URL (page slug in WordPress) is containing the same keywords.
- Choose a nice theme layout that fits your topic, and if possible use a customized header. Using a customized header will give your site a slightly different look from the other WORDPRESS.COM web sites.
- Change the tagline in the general settings and start writing the way you do on your web site!
As you saw, there are several blogging platforms and free web site building platforms that you can use to promote your web site. There are a lot more out there on the Internet, but you need to look for the ones that rank well in the search engines before you put your valued time into building a linking "empire".
Tip
These services are free of charge and sometimes live on the revenue that comes from the blog content they host. If you don't want to be on such a platform where there are advertisements around your writing, don't use them. If you are afraid that you can lose your blog on such sites look for a way to make backups (for example, on WORDPRESS.COM you can use the Export function).