How To Use Guest Blogging and Q and A Sites To Improve Your Website Traffic
Q & A SitesQ&A sites help people put there question directly in front of a community and get fast feedback if used correctly can unleash a huge flood of targeted traffic what's more since these are people actively looking for answers if your product can answer them you'll have a lot of conversions on your hands! These sites often rank very highly in Google (with many struggling to outrank them!) so you really need to make sure you add them to your traffic arsenal. However like Niche forums there is some etiquette needed you can't simply start firing your link around everywhere you need to provide helpful in-depth answers and then provide your link as an additional reading source or reference to help the asker improve his/her knowledge.
Step 1. - Top Question & Answer Sites:
Yahoo Answers Wiki Answers Askville (Amazon) I recommend you start with Yahoo Answers since has the largest community as well as ranking the strongest in Google.The following is based on Yahoo Answers
Step 2.How To Find Questions To Answer
In order to find open questions click "Advanced search" (next to the search box) enter an appropriate keyword scroll down to "Question status" and select "Open questions" then click submit this ensures onlyopen questionsare shown in the search results.
Step 3.How To Increase Your Chances Of GainingBest Answer
Generally the more helpful and long your answer is the more favourable it will be seen, if you get rated as "Best answer" this massively improves the chances of your link being clicked (since most people see reading afterbestanswer worthless). I've also found I can simply copy and paste info directly from my site as my answer and since it's already in-depth and long it's usually voted as best answer. The following day you should login to Yahoo answers and click "My Activity - My Q&A - My Questions" this will bring a list of the questions you've answered along with their status (once they'rein voting)you can click on them and vote for your answer as the best answer (if you believe it to be). I've often found no one else chooses the best answer so by default yours will be chosen.
Guest Blogging/Reciprocal Linking
This is a win-win situation since the blog owner gets a unique blog post for free and you get to tap into targeted traffic which someone else has spent years building.
Step 1(Optional) Use Mozilla firefox and download SEOmoz plugin
Step 2
Search in Google "Your themes keyword + blog" i.e. Cat food + blog other search queries you can use include: "Your themes keyword + blogs" "Your themes keyword + Wordpress" "Your themes keyword + Blogger" "Your themes keyword + comment" It's important to find a targeted blog, if you can't find one make the niche wider i.e. if your site was about cat food you'd extend it to "cat + blog" and then "pet + blog".
Step 3
If you're using SEOmoz with Firefox tap your search query into the search box (to the right of the address bar) and you're see your results: Beneath each entry is the PR value of each link you should visit (at least) the first three pages of search results opening up the those with the highest PR value (this will benefit our SEO as well as the natural click throughs). If you're not using SEOmoz open up the 5 busiest relevant blogs (those with regular posts and active comments).
Step 4
Now we need to visit the blogs and find a "Contact" or "About me" page there should either be an email address or a contact form (if not simply write a comment on the most recent post) suggest you've been reading the blog and are impressed (perhaps mention a few points you learnt) and add that you've got a blog or website in the same niche and you'd love to:
Write a guest post on their blog In which case suggest the post would be new fresh content written just for their blog (make sure it is!) give the blog owner an idea of the title and at suggest at the bottom there would be a small section explaining to the blog readers who you are and where they can find your website. Or Swap linksTo maximise the benefit of this you should try and get a link in either the site owner's sidebar or footer since this will show on multiple pages. Give them the text copy you'd like to have placed as well as a link to your homepage. Suggest if they don't feel comfortable adding the sidebar link they could write a small review of your website/blog and in return you'd do the same (remember you have to give to receive!)
Step 5.Enjoy the traffic!
A guest blog post will bring a sudden rush of targeted traffic whilst a link will more likely improve the SEO value of the placed link.Blog commentingon steroids! Recently blogs have started to include a "top contributors" widget to their sidebar which automatically displays the usernames of those who've written the most comments if your username is your keyword and you've added a link to your name when writing comments you will find you'll now have a link on multiple pages of a high PR blog. The plug-in is called "Top Commentators".
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