The Best Backlink Strategy For SEO

#beginners #tutorial #watercooler #productivity

For the past two months, my full focus has been on building and developing my blog on The Handy Developers' Guide.
Doing this has led me to learn a lot of things about:

Leadership,
Making managerial-level decisions
SEO, in its entirity.
Wordpress
Building and managing a community
Marketing
Project management and a host of other things.

Today, however, I want to share about a part of SEO that, although it is something I already knew, I feel like I have struck goldmine with!

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks, also known as inbound or incoming links, are hyperlinks from external domains that point to pages on your website. They are a component of off-page SEO, serving as signals of trust and authority to search engine algorithms. High-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites can enhance your site's domain authority, improve its search engine rankings, and increase organic traffic by influencing factors like PageRank and anchor text relevance.

I asked chatGPT to give me two definitions of backlinks to aid understanding, and this is what I got.

Why Are Backlinks Important For SEO?

Improved Rankings: Search engines like Google view backlinks as votes of confidence. The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the higher it is likely to rank in search results.
Increased Visibility: Backlinks help search engines discover your site faster and index it. When reputable sites link to you, it improves your website's chances of appearing in relevant searches.
Referral Traffic: Backlinks can bring visitors directly to your site from the linking website, especially if the link is on a high-traffic page.
Authority Building: When authoritative and relevant websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your site is credible and valuable.
Enhanced Brand Reputation: Backlinks from trusted sources boost your brand’s visibility and reputation in your industry or niche.

Backlink Strategies For Your SEO

Ideally, these backlink strategies ought to help you build out the online presence of your blog or page:

Define Your Goals
Research Your Competitors
Create Link-Worthy Content
Leverage Outreach
Utilize Broken Link Building
Get Listed in Directories
Repurpose Content
Engage in Community Participation
Monitor Your Backlinks
Focus on Consistency

While these strategies are good and have proven very valuable to me and a lot of teams out there, I will be sharing my eureka discovery about backlinks shortly.

The Best Backlink Strategy For Blogs and SEO

In my experience with SEO and building out THDG, I have seen that the best way to add (credible?) backlinks to your website is by adding your links to your Dev Community (dev.to) posts.
This can come in the way of cross-posting, or just handling your entire blog here but inputting the link(s) to your product in your blogposts.

Why This Backlink Strategy Is The Best

I didn't know until I went on my Google Search Console account for THDG and discovered the "Links" tab did I know the full weight of my backlinks.
The thing with posting content on dev.to, especially developer/coding content, is that your content is going to be picked up by a lot of blogs.
These blogs (I don't know how they do it) seem to feed Devto posts directly to their blogs or repost them, especially if they fall under a specific language.

From this image, you can see that my blog has been reposted a staggering 1612 times without any effort of ours. You can also see that the most reposted content is the start of our Devtools series on THDG: Devtools Startup Ideas: Building an AI-Powered Debugging Assistant With Code Samples!!

When I first saw this, I thought to myself, "no womder my content has been ranking higher on Google's SERPs."

Whether you set your original blog link as the canonical link for your devto posts or you (like I am doing in this post) distribute your blog link generously through the post, these devto affiliate blogs will pick up your content; repost it, and build your site's credibility.

This image shows that so far, 40 different sites (including devto) have referenced my blog posts. It also shows how many times they've been referenced.

Trust me, this is not promotional content for Devto 😅😅 But I just love this platform so much; it keeps getting better and better!! ❤️

In case you missed the dozen or so links I have scattered across this post, check out my blog on The Handy Developers' Guide.

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