Is it mandatory to create some backlinks to rank a post on the first page of search engines?
I’m saying this because most of you believe that without creating any backlinks, it’s not possible to rank posts.
I totally disagree with this practice because Google LOVES Quality links, NOT Building Backlinks in Any Ways!
In addition, if you can tweak your posts in the best possible way, then you can rank them without even building any backlinks.
Every one of you wants to see that your posts are on the first page of Google, Bing, and other search engines, but most of you fail to tweak your posts with the perfect white-hat (on-page) SEO.
For that, I really wanna help you.
Yes, you’ll get the most effective, and the most updated SEO techniques from the SEO related blog posts that I publish on this blog.
I share my practical SEO knowledge with my readers so that they can apply that to their own content in order to rank them soon.
I hope that you could garner valuable knowledge regarding SEO and implement that to rank your posts.
GOOGLE RANKING WITHOUT BACKLINKS!
First of all, check some of my ranked posts by searching for the following keywords on Google:
Copyscape review
Grammarly Vs Turnitin
ProWritingAid review
Namecheap EasyWP
How to make money online without PayPal etc.
You’ll see that the posts are on the first page of Google. I’ve tested with a lot of posts and ranked them.
Now, I’ll share with you how to rank them on Google even without building any backlinks.
START WITH A NICHE ~ CHOOSE YOUR ULTRA-SPECIFIC NICHE
Before expecting your blog posts’ ranking on top of SERPs, you should choose and stick to a niche. Most online business owners fail to do this. This happens because of not setting any goals for blogging.
Most of us start blogging without going into a micro-niche, but it’s quite important. So, what does a niche mean?
Well, a niche in blogging means the specific area that your blog talks about. Suppose that your blog is on SEO, then you should only bring the topics that are relevant to SEO. So, defining the main purpose of your blog is quite important.
Also, try to go to a micro-niche. Yes, you shouldn’t write on a broad topic which will be harder to rank your posts. If your blog is on SEO, then focus on either on-page or off-page. If it’s on web hosting, then choose a narrow area such as WordPress hosting or shared hosting, etc.
If your blog talks about all shared hosting packages and another blog comes with different types of hosting packages, then your blog is likely to be ranked when someone will search for a shared hosting pack. So, this is the ultimate effectiveness of choosing a micro-niche for your blog.
Now, check your blog if you have any. Is it in a specific niche? If yes, then great. If you’re missing this important initial part, then you’ll have to start a new blog that will be focused on a specific topic and stuck to that.
FIND THE MAIN KEYWORD OF YOUR CHOSEN NICHE
After selecting the niche of your blog now is the time to keep in mind the top keyword of the niche. Suppose that you’ve decided to write on shared hosting, then “shared hosting” is the main keyword of the niche.
REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN KEEPING THE MAIN KEYWORD
Now, when you register the domain of your blog, try to keep the main keyword in it. If you wanna review different shared hosting packs on your blog, then the name can be XSharedHosting.com or XSharedHostingReview.com, etc where X is your desired additional word (s).
So, if your blog’s topic is gonna be on WordPress, then try to keep WordPress in your domain name.
When I start my niche blogs, I register the domains using Namecheap or GoDaddy because these are the top domain registrars.
HOST THE DOMAIN WITH AN SSL CERTIFICATE
When you host your domain, never forget to add an SSL certificate to it. This is because using an SSL certificate is a ranking factor on Google. It costs very little, so you shouldn’t avoid it which will give a great ranking boost.
Most hosting companies allow you to add an SSL certificate with their hosting packs, so it’s just a matter of a few clicks to have one for your blog.
USE A LIGHT THEME FOR YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE
A light theme loads very quickly which actually makes all of your posts and pages fast enough to load. So, always avoid those themes that are heavy even though they look stunning.
So, the ultimate goal is to use a simple theme on your blog.
For example, I use Schema on my blog. This is a lightweight SEO-friendly theme that loads very fast.
CUSTOMIZE THE THEME TO MAKE IT SEO FRIENDLY
After installing a nice theme on your blog, now, you’ll have to customize it for the ultimate SEO friendliness.
So, how will you do that?
First of all, change the layout of your theme. Follow these steps –
Customize — Design — Default layout for single posts only —
Choose any of the above two layouts for single posts.
In some themes, you can choose this type of layout by going to the Themes Options button. Select no sidebars in single posts and then your posts will come up without anything with it.
So, why have I told you to choose this layout?
Well, this is because you should allow your posts to load very smoothly without any restrictions. If you keep other things on any sides of your posts, then it takes much time to load on a browser which actually downgrades the ranking of your posts.
If you really wanna keep some widgets on any sides of your posts, then you can do so by limiting the number of widgets.
So, go to the Widgets section and keep one or a few of your widgets. Note that widgets will make your blog slower to load.
Finally, your theme’s customization will end by customizing the footer.
Most free WordPress themes don’t allow you to remove the footer from the themes, but it’s recommended that you remove the preset footer of your theme.
This is because a preset footer comes with the link of the theme maker’s site which remains present on all the posts and pages of your blog.
OPTIMIZE THE LOGO AND FAVICON OF YOUR WEBSITE
Most people don’t know that the logo and the favicon of a website have a great impact on its ranking. They just focus on the stunning look of a logo and a favicon.
Do you know that a heavy logo or a favicon can slow down your website? Yes, it’s. So, you should optimize them in order to make your website speedy enough.
Here’, I’ve shown how to optimize the logo of your blog which you should check. In the same way, optimize your favicon.
Note that most of the time, at the time of favicon setting, it comes to cropping it. Don’t crop a favicon because it often makes the size bigger which affects negatively on the speed of your site.
So, try to use the favicon of your site as it’s. That means whenever you go to set the favicon on your website, just use it directly, don’t hit the cropping button.
CREATE ALL THE RELEVANT CATEGORIES
Defining the categories for your site will help you stick to your niche topics. This is quite important because when I first started writing blog posts for my first ever blog, I was writing on so many different topics that it was quite difficult to stick to one specific niche.
In SMNPOST, you see that I write on at best five categories. This helps me to keep my topics relevant to one another.
Therefore, brainstorm for all the categories of your site and create them so that you can stick to your niche very well.
ENABLE BREADCRUMBS
Breadcrumbs help navigate a site well which is helpful both by search engine bots and real humans. So, enable breadcrumbs on your website.
You can do it by using the Yoast SEO plugin and I’ll show you that on the part of installing and setting up the plugin.
INSTALL AND SET UP W3 TOTAL CACHE WORDPRESS PLUGIN
All WordPress website owners should use this powerful plugin because it ultimately boosts the speed of a site many times more.
INSTALL AND SET UP YOAST SEO PROPERLY
Install the most important SEO plugin which is Yoast SEO on your site. You can check this Yoast SEO plugin review in order to learn how to use it.
OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGES FOR MOBILE DEVICES
You’re likely to see AMP on the left side of many search results when you’re on a mobile platform. AMP is the acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages which indicates that whether a page is mobile-friendly or not.
So, a responsive theme isn’t enough to make your posts mobile friendly. You’ll have to let search engines know that your posts are mobile-friendly by making the AMP versions of your posts. So, how to do this? Don’t panic because this is quite easy.
To do this, you’ll just have to install and activate a plugin called AMP. It’ll do the rest for you to make the mobile pages of your posts.
CREATE PAGES FOR IMPORTANT KEYWORDS
You know that on WordPress, you can create posts and pages. The common pages are About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy etc. But, you can also write some of your important posts on pages.
Why should you do this?
Well, a page typically has more weight than a post (I’ve noticed this!). This is because search engines know that every website owner keeps the core content on the pages of the site.
Suppose that you write on SEO, then you can make a page called “on-page SEO checklist” or something like this to focus more on it. Your readers will also get this easily because the page will come on top of all the posts on your site if your theme is a typical one or you set it through the menu section.
SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE TO GOOGLE AND BING
This is very important because you’ll be amazed to know that I did it after six months of my blog’s creation. So, what did I lose during the first six months?
A lot because search engines started indexing my content after six months of my blog’s creation. So, submit your site to Google and Bing.
RESEARCH AND COLLECT ALL THE NICHE RELATED SUITABLE KEYWORDS
Now is the time to research your niche specific keywords and collect them to write on them one by one. From my years of experience, I can say that SEMrush is the most effective keyword research tool that every one of you should use in order to get suitable keywords.
Pick the keywords that are low-competitive and are searched many times. The KD indicates the keyword difficulty of a keyword. The lower the KD of a keyword, the easier it’s to rank with the keyword. So, choose low KD keywords which are searched a healthy number of times by web searchers.
MARK THE KEYWORD ON A PRIORITY BASIS
After collecting some keywords, select them on a priority basis. You’ll want to write the most important posts, first of all.
MAKE SOME CORNERSTONE POSTS AND EMPHASIZE THEM THE MOST
You should also select some posts as the heart of your blog. These kinds of posts will play the vital role in your blog. You’ll often link them so that your readers know that the posts are quite valuable.
Yoast SEO has started a feature called the Cornerstone posts which can help you mark the main posts of your blog.
START WRITING BLOG POSTS ON THE KEYWORDS ON A DAILY BASIS
Now, you’re ready to write your posts. You must write daily which will not only help you to publish posts on a regular basis, but you could also improve your writing with this.
If you can publish a post daily, you’ll see that your blog is full of posts on several niche related keywords. This will take you one step ahead to make an authority blog on the niche.
OPTIMIZE TITLES FOR BETTER CTR
The CTR of your post has great value when it comes to ranking. I’ve already discussed the importance of CTR in one of my posts. You can read the post here –
What’s CTR and why it’s important?
So, a post’s CTR is determining how many clicks its got from SERPs out of how many times it’s been served on SERPs.
It’s good to create a persuasive CTR for your post so that your audience is likely to hit it when they find it on SERPs. Higher CTR must boost your post’s rankings.
OPTIMIZE THE FIRST LINE OF YOUR POSTS
After the title of a post, its first line is very much important.
I’ve already written a post on the important two things of a blog post which can let you know the importance of the first few lines of a post.
Make sure that you’re hooking your readers with the initial part of your post. This is because your readers are likely to read the whole blog post if they’re hooked from the beginning.
And if your readers read your posts in full, this behavior is beneficial to higher rankings.
For some SEO purposes, try to keep the main keyword of your post in the first paragraph. If you do this, then you won’t have to use write any meta descriptions for your post’s meta description section.
USE RELEVANT AND EYE-CATCHING IMAGES JUST AFTER THE FIRST LINE
Why do this?
You have to do this to hook your readers to slide down the page.
If you set a nice and relevant image at the beginning of your post, then your readers will obviously look at it.
How about adding some texts to the image? This will grab more attention, right?
OPTIMIZE ALL OF YOUR IMAGES USED IN YOUR POSTS
Most SEO geeks will focus on proper alt-tag setup when it comes to image optimization, but you have to pay heed to the size of your images too.
Optimize your images with proper keywords, but don’t forget to compress their size.
USE HEADING TAGS IN THE BEST POSSIBLE MANNER
Most bloggers fail to use header tags properly because of the myth of using H2 once only.
When I started blogging, I was told the same. So, I was strict in checking whether I’ve used H1 once or more.
One day, when I found a post ranked in the first position on Google with one of the high volume keywords, I felt some interests to check its SEO score.
I became astonished to see that the author of the post used h1 at least 10 times in it.
So, you should maintain the proper hierarchy when you use header tags.
It’s suggested not to use h1 again in your blog post because h1 is the main title of your post.
Then, try to keep the same header tags for all similar types of subheads.
WRITE THE BODY PROPERLY KEEPING THE RATIO OKAY
fill up with all the relevant resources
never ignore adding up anything important
MAINTAIN A GOOD LENGTH FOR WRITING YOUR POSTS
I see that length matters a lot at the time of ranking a post.
If you wanna rank your posts high on SERPs, you need to craft at least 1000 worded post. It’s not uncommon to see that posts below 1000 words rank high, but oftentimes, posts with more content rank high on Google.
USE RELEVANT LINKS PROPERLY
Use internal links only when they’re relevant.
When you use outbound links, judge their authority.
And don’t plaster your post with a lot of affiliate links. You know that most affiliate links are ugly looking, so try to make them no-follow.
You can also use images to put links on them.
OPTIMIZE YOUR POSTS FOR BETTER AVERAGE READING DURATION
Follow these things –
- Give an overview of your post in the beginning
- Keep suspense
- Use eye-catching and meaningful images
- Keep a wrap-up section in the end
- CTA for note down the main points
REDUCE THE BOUNCE RATE OF YOUR POSTS
- Use more and more relevant internal links
- CTA for reading other important posts
- Use persuasive words for taking actions
ENCOURAGE YOUR READERS TO SHARE YOUR POSTS
More sharing means more engagement.
And more engagement means a better ranking.
This is very easy to understand.
So, why not use our readers to take your content to a wide space?
Tell them to share your content which could be re-shared again and again.
USE CTA FOR BOOKMARKING FOR MORE AND MORE REPEAT VISITORS
If your site is bookmarked, then it’s very likely that this will be visited by more people. Those who will bookmark your site will see your site’s name on top of the bookmark bar which might initiate them to hang around your site.
UPDATE OLD CONTENT TO ADD RELEVANT LINKS
When we write our content, it seems very fresh.
But over time, our content becomes obsolete even though you have written an evergreen content.
So, from time to time, look back at your old content and update it with relevant links and texts.
USE GOOGLE ADWORDS AND FACEBOOK BOOSTING PROPERLY
Using Google AdWords can be helpful to boost your ranking. Yes, if you leverage Google AdWords, and you get high CTR, then you can expect that the rankings of your content will be higher than before.
The same goes for Facebook boosting. Your social media engagement can also notify Google about your content’s popularity.
If you can follow my guidelines properly, you must rank many of your posts on the first page of Google without creating any backlinks for them.