When your site is new, the content that you produce will not magically appear on the first page of Google. It takes time for Google to trust your blog to say, “let’s recommend this to people”.
It typically takes 6–9 months from the date that an article has been published for the article to rank the highest it could ever go. Sometimes we do see articles climbing higher in rank after the 9 months mark but typically we expect the full result of how well an article might do within 9 months of it being released. The rank of your article will determine where it will appear in the search result when someone types in a key term into google.
Ranking and placement in the search result
If you rank high on a blog post, you may see your post on the first page of Google. If you have a low rank on a blog post, you may see your post on the 50th page.
6–9 months is a long time to wait for bloggers. You may have to wait half a year for your article to do well and for more people to come to your site!
There are other things you can do during those 6–9 months to drive traffic to your blog — promoting, interlinking, and backlinking.
We all know what promoting is and what interlinking (adding links to other articles you have in your blog within an article you have) is so let’s talk about backlinking and why that is important in your blog’s overall performance.
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What is backlinking?
Backlinking is essentially the links that you can find in blogs that lead people to another site. You want to have as many high-quality backlinks to your site as you can get. In other words, you want to have other people embedding a link to your blog in their blog posts.
If a website has a high domain authority, having them post a link to your site in their blog posts would be more valuable than having an unknown blog with a low domain authority posting a link to your website.
Think of backlinking as the stamp of approval. Google wants to make sure it’s giving searchers the best information on the internet so they’ll suggest articles that are most likely to be received better by the readers. To do so, they take into account several things including how many backlinks (stamp of approval) a site has.
Having a lot of backlinks will increase your domain authority thus propelling you up the rank. When someone searches a key term, Google is more likely to push your content to the readers if you got a lot of approval from other sites.
Click here to learn 10 easy ways to drive free traffic to your site.
Not all backlinks are equal
Backlinks from irrelevant sites that aren’t in your niche may not help you increase your domain authority. Instead, it may hurt your domain authority.
If you buy backlinks (yes you can do so), it may help increase your domain authority but Google may catch on to it quickly, realizing that you’re trying to fake domain authority when you don’t really have any. They’ll punish your site such that even if you do post good content, it won’t get seen by people. This is why we must never buy backlinks.
Google is also very smart. Most of the time, they know if it’s low-quality backlinks. Low-quality backlinks don’t help your site in any way yet they may harm your site.
Backlinks from websites with a higher domain authority would be more helpful in increasing your domain authority than websites with lower domain authority. High-quality backlinks win over low-quality backlinks.
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What is domain authority?
Domain authority is the performance score of your website. The higher the DA score, the more likely it is for a website to be getting a lot of visitors and monthly pageviews.
You can find out your Domain authority for free with sites like Ubersuggest and Hrefs.
Domain authority is also a score of how successful a website is. Generally, the higher the domain authority of a website, the more high-quality backlinks a blog tends to have.
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How do you get backlinks?
There are a lot of ways to get backlinks to your site. For example, you can email a lot of people in your niche to ask them if they want to guest post or collaborate. Many would not agree especially if you aren’t well known in your industry yet.
It’s not uncommon for a person to send out 300 emails and only get one “yes”. But the brand that agrees to collaborate may have a low domain authority score.
You can also find broken links on other people’s sites and ask them to replace them with your link. This strategy would work well since no one wants a broken link on their site, it’s not good for SEO. However, it’ll be very difficult to find a broken link. You’ll have to go through hundreds of articles across hundreds of blogs in your niche to find a broken link and then curate your articles to fit what they lack, email hundreds of blog owners, and maybe get 1 “yes”.
Read: How to use Google keyword planner to do content research for bloggers
The safest strategy to get backlinks
Majority of bloggers would spend 50% of their time creating content for their blogs and another 50% of their time reaching out to other bloggers for guest posts and building backlinks. Instead, what they should do is to spend the majority of their time creating content (95%) and just 5% of their time building backlinks.
The reason why you should spend a lot more time creating content than building backlinks is that although backlinks do help propel your content up the rank, it’s not a good use of your time.
It takes an incredible amount of time just to get 1 backlink. Another person who used the time creating content would end up with more content of higher quality.
The safest strategy to get backlinks is to build up your brand.
Create a YouTube channel, a TikTok page, an Instagram, a P-interest, etc to promote and market your brand. With persistent effort and consistent release of high-quality content, you’ll surely build up your brand and people will naturally link to your blog.
Don’t be afraid to reach out to other people in your niche on other platforms, don’t be afraid to collaborate with them in a YouTube video or a podcast for instance.
While you build up your brand, you should also strive to produce unique content that can’t be found anywhere else. This could mean content that stems from your own experiments, content that has helpful tables, charts, and graphs that other bloggers won’t spend the time to produce.
Backlinks will come easily without you forcing it on your blog when you focus on creating helpful original content. That’s the safest backlinking strategy you can pursue.
Other strategies could get your site banned by Google (if the backlinks come unnaturally by Google’s standards even if they were legit sources albeit maybe not too influential in your field) and would take too much time to produce one single backlink.
That’s not to say backlinks aren’t good. They are good but the point this article is trying to convey is that to get high-quality backlinks is to first build up your brand.
Don’t pursue risky linkbuilding strategies such as “I link to you every week, you link to me every week” or “let’s get a group chat to take turns linking to everybody each week”. Trust me, those strategies although could ramp your DA score up for a while, it’ll drop, it’s not sustainable and the Google algorithm will know what’s up.
Get your backlinks in the most legitimate way. If people found your content helpful, they’ll link to you without asking. Those are the most authentic backlinks.
I’d say, you can still continue to email people to ask if they want to guest post but don’t spend too much time doing it. Use your time to create more high-quality content.
Read: 50 ways to make extra money today
Final thought
Many bloggers would focus on backlinks so much that they neglect the most important thing they should do — create useful content that people want to read.
If you continue to put out high-quality content in a niche that needs it and you continue to promote it on other platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc, the pageviews will increase with time, the visitors will come, you will build up your brand.
The best thing you can do as a blogger is to build up your brand and that takes time. Once you build up your brand, quality backlinks will arrive.
Good luck!
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