Link Building: Can It Help Grow Your Blog?

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In my opinion, the secret to a successful blog is to keep growing it. You should always look to bring in new readers as this helps you increase your web traffic and reap the rewards of monetization. Clearly, there are a handful of ways you can grow a blog. Today, we’re going to look at one possible tactic - link building.

What is link building?

Link building is considered an off-page SEO technique. Most of you should know that SEO stands for search engine optimization and that it refers to how well your website performs in search engines. So, by definition, off-page SEO is all about things that you do away from your website to improve its search engine performance.

With link building, the idea is that you build a collection of links to your website. These should come from other online sources - like blogs, news websites, etc. When one of these sources links to your website, this is called a backlink. So, the purpose of link building is to generate as many backlinks as possible.

How does link building help you grow your blog?

The majority of people still find new blogs and resources through a search engine. They key in a phrase, then click on the results. Most of the time, they only click on one of the first 10 results. The higher up the page you are, the more chance your blog has of being clicked.

Link building is seen as a critical SEO ranking factor by Google. Why? Because if a website has lots of backlinks, then it must mean that the site is trustworthy. It makes your website look like an authentic source of information as lots of other websites are linking to it. Google wants to present users with the most trustworthy and useful websites, so it bumps up sites that have lots of backlinks. As such, your ranking improves, and your blog can gain more traffic and grow its audience.

How do you gain backlinks?

There’s one major consideration here; the quality of your backlinks. They must come from reliable and trustworthy sources. They can’t be generated by robots or come from spam links in comment sections. The link has to be natural and generated by a user, or else Google thinks it’s spam and will penalize you.

The best approach is to find a blogger outreach network where you can get organic links from other websites. It’s pretty hard to do, which is why lots of bloggers seek out an SEO company to help with this. If you can generate some high-quality backlinks, then your website will reap the rewards. Whatever you do, don’t buy any links, and don’t go around spamming yours wherever you see fit. They have to be organic, they must naturally be included in other content, and they need to be from legitimate sources.

Most bloggers neglect link building because: a), it can be quite challenging to gain backlinks, and b) people assume it doesn’t work because lots of blogs have been hit with link building penalties. Realistically, any penalties have come from the blogger not following the link building best practices and spamming their links! If done correctly, this tactic will definitely help you gain more web traffic and grow your blog.