So you’ve decided to start a blog. Blogs are a great way to share high-quality content to your audience. However, the journey doesn’t end after your blog goes live.
It would help if you found a way for people to discover your blog and content. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply host a blog on the internet, and you need to find proactive ways to make your blog more visible.
A linking strategy can help you out once you’ve published your blog. A linking strategy that gets you high-quality links will make your posts seem more authoritative and helpful to your audience.
Having a sound linking strategy will also improve your SEO blogging ranking on search engine results pages, so getting linking right is something you should spend serious time developing.
Different kinds of links serve different purposes, so you may need to adopt a variety of link types in your linking strategy.
Here are some essential ways to build up a linking strategy on your blog
External links
An external link is an instance of linking to a page outside of your blog or website. For example, linking to a hosted YouTube video, service or product you are reviewing, a local news page or an article that you’ve referenced would count as external links.
Adding external links to things that are relevant to your post, such as where to buy a specific product after you’ve discussed it, will improve the user experience for your readers.
The benefits of external links include:
- Linking to authoritative (high-quality and trusted) websites can increase your digital presence. Simply put, you are building a linking history between your blog and more established sites.
- External links add credibility to your blog posts. They can be used to create an in-depth experience for your readers, adding extra information about a specific topic that you didn’t cover.
- Using external links can create relationships and expand on your reach. You may find mutually beneficial or reciprocal links, depending on who you are linking to and how they can relate to your business.
- Adding external links to your linking strategy shows a deeper level of commitment to your readers and your topic. By providing added contextual information, you are giving them extra resources to explore the subject thoroughly.
Researching a topic and citing your sources well is a great way to start building up your external linking strategy.
Internal links
Internal links are post links that direct the viewer to another page on your website/blog. The goal is to lead your readers to relevant pages within your blog.
You could also use a tactical approach by linking to product, contact or about pages on your website.
Some of the benefits of internal links include:
- Improving your SEO score. This fact is true because internal links are helpful to search engines.
- Adding internal links will make your website more user friendly as readers don’t need to search so hard.
- If your readers are spending more time on your website due to internal links, your bounce rate could decrease. You want your readers to spend more time on your website, absorbing all of the information from your blog post and internal links.
Adding internal links to your new and existing blog posts is the first step in creating an internal linking strategy.
You can find out more about the importance of internal and external linking here from Verblio, a trusted SEO authority.
Tip: Make sure to always set your internal and external links to open on a new tab! You don’t want to send readers away from your webpage!
Backlinks
Backlinks are considered the ‘holy grail’ of link types for SEO. Backlinks involve other websites linking to your website.
This linking strategy can also help with organic traffic, so it’s essential to spend time building this up. The more high-quality and authoritative websites link to your site, the better search engine rankings and traffic you’ll get.
Backlinks can be quite challenging to achieve, but there are a few methods you can use:
- Do some keyword research for your topic. You may notice a popular blog is using an outdated, broken link. You can contact the webmaster informing them of this and offering to replace their link with your link, provided it fits the topic and keywords used.
- Infographics are an excellent way to gain backlinks because they are popular and easily shareable.
- Guest blogging is an incredibly effective way to reach a new audience. If you can publish your articles on another popular website, you will gain exposure and a new audience.
- You will need to promote your content if you want to start getting backlinks. This promotion may include paid ads or outreach to popular blogs or authorities, including your content. You can begin by contacting bloggers who do weekly or monthly roundups to feature your blog.
Organic linking
Organic linking or natural linking is similar to what we’ve covered, but there are some differences. An organic link is a link that is added to a website without the intention of influencing rankings. They are called organic cause they haven’t been elicited in any way.
You can think of this as a vote of confidence. However, it’s different from backlinks or outreach because someone has linked to your website without contacting you about it. Organic linking is all about having no explicit agreement surrounding linking to or from your blog/website.
Part of organic linking is producing relevant and high-quality content that others choose to link to from their website. More often than not, you’ll need to be on the first page of search engine results pages to gain these organic links, so building up your SEO will help tremendously with improving organic linking.
Being active on social media can also help you gain organic links if you are always sharing your content. Creating tutorials or sharing with communities is also an excellent way to gain organic links.
Even something as simple as a monthly newsletter could get you some links and clicks.
It’s all linked!
A well-planned linking strategy could include a mixture of internal links, external links, backlinks and organic links.
Using a varied linking system ultimately puts your blog in the eyes of more people, and can help you build long-lasting relationships with other websites if done correctly.
Need help sorting out your blog’s linking strategy? Let’s chat – our SEO marketing strategy can enormously help you out.
