Blogging Tips

Got links? Obviously, a large part of SEO involves getting backlinks. We all want and need sites to link to our blogs. Ideally, those backlinks are natural and freely given, and the best way to obtain those types of backlinks is with attractive, highly linkable content. Of course there are lots of ways to create attractive content, but one of the best is with interactive content.

Interactive content encourages the reader to do something beyond passive reading. The two types of interactive content that immediately come to mind are polls and quizzes. Both ask the reader to participate by responding to one or a series of questions. Polls merely aggregate the results, while quizzes give the reader feedback on right/wrong answers with some sort of final score. Both polls and quizzes are popular as interactive content, however, quizzes are likely to be somewhat more viral than polls, because people like to show off the scores they obtained.

This type of interactive content often easily attracts backlinks and sometimes goes viral rather rapidly. Obviously, not every poll or quiz will attract a lot of attention, but if it interesting, it has a great chance of doing so. So the next time you’re wishing for more backlinks, spend some time putting together an interesting poll or quiz. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results of your efforts.

Don’t know how to make a poll or quiz? Luckily, you don’t have to be a whiz-kid programmer to create polls and quizzes for your blog. There are several WordPress plugins available for polls and quizzes, and I’ve listed one for each type of content below. In addition, there are sites that offer widgets and cut-and-paste scripts, and again, I’ve listed one for each below. All of these plugins and scripts make the technical process simple. All you have to do is supply the fun.

Polls:
WP-Polls Plugin
PollDaddy

Quizzes:
WBQuiz Plugin
Quibblo premade quizzes (or create your own)