Hello and Welcome Friends, Authors, and Writers,
As many of my author and writer friends know, I enjoy sharing guests on my blog.
I meet many helpful friends throughout social media who do various things to help me do my job better for all of my clients. And my guest “Mike Dane” just happens to be one!
He is PR Manager at TruConversion, a platform that will help take the many tools we use now to help gain traffic to our websites and blogs and put it into one nice helpful tool we can all understand and use, and sharing with us how to create backlinks to gain more traffic . . . .
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(Mike Dane, PR Manager for TruConversion.com)
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What Mike shares is important, and I convey to all my book clients and author friends, gaining more traffic gives us the opportunity to engagement and interacting with your readers on social media as it is a vital part of your book promoting efforts. And there are many tools to use, but having just one would be so much easier.
So when Mike emailed me with some fantastic articles of different subjects, I knew he had to be a guest who can teach us some important aspects of our marketing that we may not know about on how to drive more traffic to our books too! So here is part one of a two-part series Mike has put together for all of us.
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How to build High-Quality Backlinks To Increase Blog Traffic ~ Part One
“If you have thought about SEO and taken the time to read about it, then you have come across backlinks.”
For some people, understanding this concept is sometimes a difficult part of SEO. Despite being one of the most used words in relation to SEO, many blog or website newbies find it hard to understand what backlinks are and the need to build high-quality backlinks.
Worry, not. In this post, we will delve into all the basic things about backlinks that you need to know, and believe me, by the end of this you will fully understand what this ‘monster’ word means, how to build quality backlinks and in turn, enjoy great SEO and amazing blog traffic.
Here is a sneak peek into what you should expect in this post:
What Are Backlinks:
Common terms related to Backlinks you should know
SEO advantages of backlinks
Number of backlinks your blog should have
What are quality backlinks
How do you build high-quality backlinks to increase your blog traffic?
What are backlinks:
So, what exactly are backlinks?
Generally speaking, these are incoming links to a webpage. Do you know when you visit a particular page and it has links that lead you to other pages? Yeah, that’s a backlink.
Common Terms Related To Backlinks That You Should Know
Before we delve deeper into backlinks, there are other common terms related to backlinks that you should know. Understanding these concepts will help you better understand your work and formulate great strategies.
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Here we go:
Anchor text:
This is a very common term that refers to the text that is used to hyperlink. This text is visible and when clicked, sends you to the URL that has been hyperlinked to that word. You need to be careful with your choice of anchor text because they help you rank for keywords.
Here is how an anchor text looks like:
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Source: Truconversion
As seen in the image above, the anchor text is usually visible in the sense that it stands out from the rest of the text. Some sites show the text in a different color (red in this example). In others, hovering the mouse on top of the text will show you that the word is clickable.
Link juice:
Link juice is where a web page passes when it links to your website’s homepage or any of your articles. This is important because it helps the web page rank better and also improves the domain authority.
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Here is how it works:
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Source: Adpearance
Low-quality links: These are links that come from automated sites, porn sites, harvested sites or spam sites. In actual sense, they do more harm than good. To avoid these, ensure that you get high-quality links (we will discuss this later) and also avoid buying backlinks.
Do-follow link: By default, all links that you add in a blog post are do-follow links. This type of links usually passes the link juice.
No-follow link:
This is the opposite of do-follow links. Unlike do-follow links, links with a no-follow tag do not pass the link juice. This means that even if you have linked to another web page, as long as the link has a no-follow tag, the link will not pass the link juice.
Such links are not useful to your page as far as ranking is concerned because they contribute to nothing. You are best placed to use this type of links when you are linking to an unreliable site. A great example is the comments section of another blog.
Linking root domains:
This is the number of backlinks coming into your website from unique domains. To put it in perspective, even if one website has linked to your website 10 times, this will still be considered as a one-linked domain.
I understand that this is annoying but I think it is an essential caveat to backlinking. Otherwise, the playing ground for all blogs and websites would not be as level as it is at the moment.
Internal links:
These are links that go from one page to another within the same domain. For example, a link within Truconversion blog linking to a different post within the blog. This process is known as internal linking, a very complicated yet crucial technique that you need to learn.
Internal linking as we have discussed links parts of the same website to other areas. It is done for three main reasons. One, to help in website navigation (For example, from your blog homepage, visitors can click past posts or other sections);
Two, it defines the architecture and hierarchy of your website and three, which I will briefly discuss, is to distribute page authority and ranking throughout the site.
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The seven tenets of internal linking are:
Create lots of content: Lots of content will mean that you have a lot of clickable pages.
Use anchor text: You can read about anchor text in our discussion earlier on.
Link deep: Go beyond the homepage and contact us pages. Link to deeper pages in your site.
Use relevant links: Just because you are sending people to other parts of the page doesn’t mean that you link for the sake of it. Remain relevant!
Use a reasonable number of internal links: Google ambiguously states that internal links should be at a reasonable number. The exact number? Nobody knows. Just use what works for you.
Use links that are natural for the reader: Ensure that you are user focused and use links that a user will find important. For example, links to content that is similar to what your user is reading.
Use follow links: Please visit our discussion on the do-follow links to know what they are.
SEO Advantages of Backlinks:
We have learned what backlinks are and even briefly discussed other common terms that you need to know.
But you should be wondering, after all this, what exactly is the importance of backlinks to SEO and your blog traffic?
Wait no more! Let’s get started:
Improves Organic Traffic= More Traffic
Some time back, backlinks were the major metric for ranking a web page. At this time, pages with even low-quality backlinks ranked. This means that a page with a lot of backlinks ranks higher than other pages in all major search engines such as Google.
You Get Referral Traffic
The beauty of referral traffic is the fact that it is targeted and according toHarsh Agrawal, has low bounce rate.
Let me explain this logically.
If your blog has been linked to from a different website and traffic comes to you from this particular website, then these are basically people who have been referred to you by a particular person, to learn about that specific topic you have discussed.
Let me ask you. How many times have you failed to read a blog that you clicked to? In my case, very few times.
Do you know why? I usually click the link with the intention to read that post because the anchor text gave me a hint of what to expect on the other side.
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Faster site Indexing:
Search engines are able to easily discover links to your site and lead to it when there are backlinks leading to you. This is an important aspect for new websites and blogs because they are discovered early enough.
To summarize, you need to build backlinks and also have as many unique ones as possible:
So, now that the number of backlinks matters, what is the ideal number for a blog post?
Number Of Backlinks Your Blog Should Have:
There is no exact number on how many backlinks your post should have. It all depends on what works for you.
Take Servando Silva for example. He took time to experiment and find out what worked from his site and what didn’t. Clearly, some of these things are better understood when you do your own SEO experiments and observations.
Is quantity all that you should care about? No. The quality of backlinks is also very essential in enhancing your blog’s reputation in search engines as well as increasing traffic.
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What are Quality Backlinks?
With the current Google Penguin algorithm, websites that are cheating search engines with fake and spammy backlinks are getting penalized. Before this improvement, even low-quality backlinks ranked.
So, smart humans did this:
They went round the system, created backlinks from bogus sources in order to boost their positions in the Search Engines Results Pages (SERPs).
Google discovered this and now you must have legit and quality backlinks to boost your traffic.
Here are a few characteristics of quality backlinks:
Characteristics Of Quality Backlinks:
Should Be From A Trusted Source:
A high-quality backlink comes from a high-quality website which is also a trustworthy site.
So, the big question is how you determine that a website is trustworthy.
Usually, search engines use a set of trusted seed sites which they know for a fact are high quality. These websites are known to be difficult to get backlinks from, making them the mark of website quality. These include The Huffington Post, BBC, and CNN among others.
Also, website extensions such as .edu and .gov are rated as trustworthy by Google, hence are one of the seed sites. More to come in Part Two later this week.
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*So, later this week I will have Part Two of Mike Dane of TruConversion’s Backlinks & More Traffic to our sites and pick up with more details and illustrations about seed sites. What an interesting and helpful series so far. Mike shows us just how all this works, but in easy terms, we can grasp and understand. Let us never be afraid to learn New Things that will help us as bloggers and web owners. And I can apply this knowledge to my Book Promoting and Book Marketing efforts and all my clients will benefit* . . .
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