So you want to start generating traffic to your blog? Well, as you're probably aware, the search engines are going to be your best bet for long-term, sustainable sources of visitors. One of the fundamental factors toward gaining higher rankings within the search engines is the number/quality of links pointing to the individual webpages of your website. For blog owners, it's not realistic to manually build links to each and every one of your articles; however, there are a few great ways to generate organic links to the homepage, category pages and individual blog posts.

Homepage Links

Building links to the homepage of your blog is a good way to boost the overall authority of your domain. You can then filter all of the PageRank coming from these links through to the other webpages on your blog via internal linking.

Blog Directories

Blog directories used to be a huge part of blog link building. Nowadays they have less power, and in some cases, can have a negative effect. The main thing to understand when building links from these kinds of websites is the quality of the site.

By quality, don’t just look at domain metrics like Domain Authority, PR, etc. –look at the traffic potential of the site. Websites that are likely to actually generate traffic through to your blog are a great indicator of a good link target.

Blog directories like Technorati, AllTop and OnTopList are good examples of this.

Resource/Links Pages

Most blogs have a 'useful links' page where they list a few sites that they like or are relevant to their readers. These pages are a prime target for a quick and easy link.

Most webmasters will ask for a 'link exchange' for a link on their 'links' pages – i.e. you have to place a link to their blog within your site as well. This is something that Google started cracking down on a few years ago and often devalues reciprocal links; however, you can get around this with a simple trick.

Set up your own 'useful links' page that you can use for your reciprocal links but ask your programmer to add the necessary code in the head section of the page. This will ensure that any of the links from that page do not pass any PageRank, and will avoid getting your links devalued.

One quick way to find a load of links/resource pages that are relevant to your niche is through running the following footprints within ScrapeBox (replacing 'Keyword' with your niche):

intitle:KEYWORD inurl:links

intitle:KEYWORD inurl:resources

ScrapeBox

Note: If you don't have ScrapeBox, you can do it the manual way and just search within Google using the same search queries.

Get Interviewed/Quoted

A great way to gain contextual links is to be interviewed or quoted on other industry relevant blogs. Once you have established yourself within your niche, then you will regularly receive requests to give input into other articles. Until then, you might need to do a little manual outreach.