32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links - Expanded

This article expands on Hubspot's "32 White Hat Ways to Build Inbound Links" written by Corey Northcutt by adding a few more ideas to what Corey discussed. Oh, and, if you don't mind, please tweet a few snippets from this blog post. If you do that, we may then be able to afford to buy Loraine in the cube next to me a new ficus tree since she killed yet another one .....sorry, long story. : )

Building inbound links to your blog or website is the most important way to bring more visitors to your site and to influence search engines to rank your page higher.  If you can add inbound links without trying to pull the wool over Google's eyes, then Google will reward instead of penalize you.

Get your blog on

In this section of Corey's article, he outlined several ways to use your blog. I would add the following:

Use Tweetable quotes in your blog content to get readers to tweet
In your blog posts, put tweetable snippets with a Twitter share button displayed on them. Your readers are looking for tweetable content. If you provide short, simple content for them, they'll be much more motivated to send out that Tweet. Don't take up the full 140 characters though.  Leave room for them to put in their own hashtag or re-tweet text.


Link to other blogs and your own blog, from within your blog articles
Linking to other people's blogs will encourage those blog owners to repay you the favor by linking back to you. But, don't forget to link to your own blog articles as well. This type of interlinking will encourage readers to click through and read more articles on your blog. This decreases the abandonment rate on your blog.  The abandonment rate can be considered by search engines who rank your page. If users stay on your blog website for longer, it makes your blog look all shiny and sparkley and stuff. Google loves shiny, sparkley things.

Write guest blog posts
Write a guest post blog on someone else's website. Your content will be posted on someone else's blog which means their readers will become familiar with you and visit your site. Sign up to be a guest blogger on myblogguest.com. It's a great place to find a guest blogger and to list yourself as one too.

Invite another blogger to write a guest post on your site
If the author has a decent social following of her/his own, you can expect that she will use social media to promote the article which also drives traffic to your site. This is a great concept, but don't overuse it. You should author your own blog and then have a few guest posts from time to time. You can apply to guest post on this blog here.

Create content beyond your blog

In this section Corey encourages you to invest in more than just blog content. I would add that from within your ebook, you should create hyperlinks to your own blog content, post short, and add tweetable quotes in the ebook to encourage readers to tweet the content.

Create an infographic and post it on Pinterest 
Infographics are insanely popular. Click on the image on the left for an example.
When you create one, post it on your blog page and then on Pinterest. The link on the pinterest page should point back to the blog article url which will serve to further drive traffic to your article. Place social share links on the infographic and supply the html code for others to be able to post the infographic on their own websites. Don't forget to write text on the Pinterest page that uses your keywords. This will help in your search rankings.

Tweet your infographics with [INFOGRAPHIC] in your tweet 
Once posted on your blog or Pinterest page, tweet the infographic and include [INFOGRAPHIC] in your tweet. People recognize this and will click through to view.

Create custom graphics for your blog image
For your blog posts, first pick out a good image using Creative Commons that has no usage restrictions. Again, if you don't use an image on your blog, Google will pout about it because all-text is not sparkley and shiny whereas text with an image is all pretty-like. Then, using the image, create a graphic and place text on it that will entice viewers to visit the link like the one below. The image should be posted to your Pinterest board.  Since viewers of Pinterest will also see the sparkley text prominently on the image, they will click the image. The link on the pinterest page should point back to the blog article url which will serve to further drive traffic to your article. And, while you're at it, you should add your logo to the bottom of the image you've created. That way, if people repin your image to their Pinterest boards, your logo will always be present.

Create a meme image and post it on your blog article and Pinterest page
Meme images are those funny images you see moving around the internet. They too are all sparkley and shiny, and make people giggle. You can highjack some of these images for your own use. See below for an example of one that was posted to a blog article about how to double your Gmail inbox placement rates. And here is the same image posted on our Pinterest board. The link on the Pinterest post points back to the blog article. A free tool to help you find and build your meme image is memegenerator.net. There you can pick from hundreds of meme images and write your own text on them.

You can follow Corey Northcutt on Twitter at @northcuttSEO