Link Building Strategies for a Blog

Blogging is not just about writing and publishing. Blogging also means doing SEO so that you can receive traffic. Your blogging journey will be fruitful only when you receive traffic. You can receive traffic through multiple ways but the most useful one is SEO. Whether you do SEO or not, your blog will of course rank on google or other search engines. Every page published on the internet is indexed by search engines, when search engines index the pages, or let's say search engine bots crawl the pages, your blog will rank on the search engines. Ranking on search engines means your website or blog appears on the search engine result page. However, you can benefit only when your blog is ranked high on the search result pages, if possible on the top 5 results, if not on the first page, or within 3 pages of the research result. If your blog ranks on the 30th page, it will be never found by the readers and you will never have search traffic. High ranking is a result of various factors and one of them is backlinks. In the past you could rank well without backlinks, but these days it is impossible.

Why Backlinks Are Important

Backlinks are one of the popular off-page SEO strategies. However, it is also one of the most difficult SEO strategies. Difficult because your website links and post links should be shared on other websites and it is not an easy method to convince other website owners t share your links. Backlinks are basically no-follow and do-follow. No-follow links do not pass link juice, in other words, they don't tell search engines to specifically follow the link. When search engines are not asked to follow the link, they do not take a note of the link, therefore, no-follow backlinks do not affect search engine ranking. Do follow links pass link juice, in other words, do-follow links tell search engines to follow the link. When search engines follow the links, your website will get a nudge on the search engine ranking. Social media links, blog comment links are no-follow, you can get do-follow links through guest posting.

Ranking High on Search Engines

Moz is an SEO company, it has devised its own ranking system that tries to analyze the power of the domain and web pages based on the number of backlinks and quality of backlinks. For instance, if your website has 100 backlinks and if the website on the same niche has 50 backlinks, your website will have higher domain authority and higher page authority. Moz ranking is good to check the SEO power of your website. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing have their own ranking system based on their own unique algorithm. They do not follow what ranking system other companies are using. While you can have higher domain authority and page authority of you have a lot of backlinks, getting high rank on Google is not just about having a lot of backlinks, the google rank si also based on a number of other factors like keyword usage, content quality, content originality, etc. What ultimately matters is your website's position on google search engine result page (or bing or yaahoo, for that matter), because that's how you get organic traffic. When your site receives organic traffic, you are very much likely to make money from your website because organic traffic has high conversion.

Common Mistakes Bloggers Make While Doing SEO

Sadly when it comes to doing SEO bloggers make a lot of mistakes.

Backlinks: A lot of people commit this basic mistake while building backlinks. They only build backlinks for the home page. You should actually build backlinks for each of your blog posts. Always build backlinks from related website.

Focusing only on On-Page SEO: Bloggers focus only on adding relevant keywords. They miss important strategies like building backlinks and improving website look and experience.

Building low quality backlinks: Backlinks are important but these backlinks will help only when they come from quality sites. However, bloggers start building backlinks through web directories, article directories and link farms.

Bad design, poor user experience: How your website look also matters, sadly, bloggers do not take much about user experience and user interface.

You cannot rank your website on search engines, with a single strategy. You need to use keywords as well as build backlinks, and also improve user experience and user interface.

5 Steps of Building Internal Linking Strategy         

Internal linking means you link your content with one another, for example, you share links to another articles on your posts. External linking means you share your web pages links on someone else’s website. Internal linking means on-page SEO, where as external linking means off-page SEO.

Here are 6 steps of building internal linking strategy:

Identify your site’s authority pages. In other words, identify your site’s main articles. The main articles are the best articles of your site. The best article means the articles that get a lot of traffic and has high ranking on search engines.

Create topic clusters using internal linking. In other words, link all related content.

Choose the right anchor text. Use the proper keywords to link your internal pages.

Use internal links to increase rankings of the target pages. When a lot of links point to your article, its ranking will improve even when the links are coming from your own website

Understanding the Key Terms Related to Internal Linking

When it comes to SEO, internal linking is as important as external linking. Therefore, you should use internal links to optimize your content for better search engine ranking. However, before you start building internal links you need to understand a couple of key terms:

Topic Clusters: Topic Clusters refer to the multiple pages on your website (articles, posts) that are about the same topic. All articles on the same topics are interlinked.

Crawl Depth: When someone lands on your website, how pages he need to visit before reaching the target content only through the internal links? In other words, how many times visitors need to click to reach the specific page from homepage?

Orphaned pages: This refers to the web pages on your website with zero internal links pointing towards them.

How to Build Internal Links

Building Internal Links is very important for on-page SEO. Here are 5 important lessons to build internal links.

Internal links: Check how many pages in your website have internal links. Make sure there are zero orphaned pages (pages with 0 internal links pointing to them)

Pages Crawl Depth: When you are building internal links, you need to make sure your visitors can reach to your specific pages in less than 3 clicks from the home page through internal links.

Internal Link Distribution: How many links are pointing towards your content, are the links pointing to the related content?

Internal Link Issues: Are there any broken links? Do the links actually take the visitors to the page that is linked? Have you used a proper anchor text (text that links to anther web page) to share links?

Pages Passing Most Internal Links: Find out which pages have the most influence on your other pages. Know the authoritative pages on your website.

Things You Should Understand About Backlinks

Backlinks work only when your links are shared on the websites that are in the same niche as yours and they are ranked higher than your website. For example, if your website is about gaming, you need backlinks from a gaming niche website that is ranked higher than your website on the search engine result page. Guest posting can work but it is not free. If you want to do a guest post on a high-ranking website, you might have to pay. In fact, a lot of websites make money by opening their websites for paid guest posting. You can do free guest posting only when the website is low ranking