Increase backlinks with single-topic blogs

One of the most important goals of any blogger is to increase the number of back-links to their blog in order to rank higher up in search engine results.

There are a wide range of techniques used by bloggers to encourage backlinking. More often than not the most effective way is to make it easy for visitors to share blog posts with social media buttons.

Check out these articles that also discuss how to popularize your blog:

• Link strategy: Internal links vs. backlinks
• Publicize vs. sharing vs. dynamic share buttons on WordPress sites
• How to boost sales with blog post targeting
• Bloggeting: Something every business person should know

However, providing the facilities required to share content doesn't make that content worth sharing in the first place. So here's a handy hint that will dramatically increase the chances of people referencing your content.

Restrict blog posts to a single concept, topic or idea

I am often guilty of trying to be comprehensive in my writing. I want to cover all the bases. The problem is that this strategy doesn't recognize how the Internet is used by readers.

Most people are after a specific bit of information or news. That's what they're searching for in Google. If you're writing blogs that cover four or five separate subjects in one go, you are going to create pages that are:

• not sufficiently focused enough to appear at the top of searches
• frustrating to use because visitors have to search for the specific bit of information they want

These two points combine to rob your content of its referencability, or sharability - not sure if either of those are real words, but you get the picture.

No matter how compelling or well written your blog posts are, unless they are focused like a laser beam on a single topic or idea, you are hurting your chances of becoming super popular.

More about how to really popularize your blog in these articles:

• Drive traffic with effective blogging
• Small business publicity: Writing '300 retweets' articles
• How to avoid a high bounce rate on your blog
• How to get blog posts to the top of search results: Part I

So what happens when you have to deal with several different topics that are related? You might ask...

Simple. Break the post up into its constituent topics and create a new post for each one, ensuring that you frequently cross reference each related post where appropriate to do so. This has a number of benefits:

• leads to more content pages for Google to index
• increases the number of quality internal links that help to drive the flow of traffic through your site and reduce bounce rate
• Makes your body of content more organized and easier to understand

Fight the urge to create dense, complex content. Even if you are an excellent writer, you still need to take into account your readership. And online, no matter who you are catering for, your readership wants, quick, concise, and simple content broken up into bite-sized chunks.