Want higher rankings and more traffic? Well, Backlinko could well be the right place to be. Backlinko is where you can find next-level SEO training and link-building strategies.
Backlinko is where professional marketers turn for proven SEO advice. A long list of well-known international companies such as Apple, Disney, IBM, and Amazon subscribe to their newsletter and use their marketing services.
How Backlinko Helps You Get Higher Rankings and More Traffic
Backlinko is the brainchild of Brian Dean. He’s kind of a big deal in the SEO scene with nearly 500,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, you can understand that he’s definitely a major influencer in this field.
In addition to starting Backlinko, Brian is also the owner of Exploding Topics and has delivered multiple courses on SEO. He started Backlinko which has become a prolific SEO blog that ranks for pretty much everything.
SEMrush Buy Backlinko
Brian recently sold Backlinko in a multi-million dollar deal to SEMrush. As part of the deal, Brian will continue to work together with SEMrush on Backlinko but on a part-time basis. So expect everything to pretty much continue as it has been.
Brian started off studying nutrition as he wanted to be a dietitian. After he received a master’s in nutrition he started a Ph.D. program in nutrition at Purdue University in Indiana.
But Brian hated everything about what he was now doing and decided to get out of there. He says it was the best thing that ever happened to him.
The next step was a job offer in New York but as he was driving there they called him up and told him that due to the financial crisis (this was back in 2008), a hiring freeze had just been brought in and so there was no longer a job to go to.
So he turned the car around and headed back to stay with his parents, in their basement, while he figured out what was next. He started reading Timothy Ferris’s book the Four-hour Work Week and decided to be an entrepreneur. Thank you, Timothy Ferris!
He started building websites and learning about SEO and how to get traffic to these websites. Brian was stony broke so pay-per-click was out of the question. He decided that SEO was the way forward.
Over time he eventually created a bunch of sites but they all initially failed. He got hit by Google update after Google update, but by 2012 he had started to put the pieces together with an affiliate site in the personal finance niche.
The site did really well really fast using only SEO. Brian then realized that he needed to learn more about SEO but all the advice he could find online was vague and not very helpful. He could find nothing practical on how to actually do what he needed to do.
At this point, Brian decided that if he was looking for content on SEO that would help you understand the topic, there were probably more people looking for this too. So he decided to create a blog that would document his journey and provide helpful information and advice for people looking to get to grips with SEO.
Backlinko Grows
Brian is a self-confessed control freak who wants to do everything himself but he realized that in order to scale you have to let go, and if you really want to scale, like with a capital S, you really have to let go and have other people scaling for you.
This is the reasoning behind the multi-million dollar sale of Backlinko to SEMrush recently. Brian had shown he could learn to expand the business just as well as he had learned SEO.
The Backlinko site has some crazy stats. Domain Reputation of 89 and monthly traffic figures of over 600,000 visitors all help it rank for difficult keywords such as “backlinks” and other SEO-related search phrases.
So it isn’t hard to see why SEMrush would be interested. Brian had received other offers but he wasn’t really interested to sell as the site was making him a lot of money without a lot of stress and it was the perfect business model for him.
But out of the blue, Brian received an email from SEMrush letting him know they were in the market to buy something and would he be interested in selling Backlinko.
At that time Brian had been working on a new project, Exploding Topics. This was a different type of challenge as it was a subscription business starting from scratch. Building something that wasn’t tied to his personal brand appealed to Brian.
Trying to build Exploding Topics and keep Backlinko at the top of the tree started to become stressful and so the email out of the blue from SEMrush came at just the right time.
Backlinko & Brian Dean – A Match Made In Heaven
Backlinko is Brian’s baby and he didn’t want to see it abandoned as it was proving to provide essential support and advice for many people grappling with SEO-related issues on their traffic sites.
SEMrush was perfect because they have a ton of authority in the SEO space and they also have a lot of knowledgeable SEO people. They also really wanted to keep the Backlinko identity and goals of helping others as opposed to just absorbing it into some bigger thing.
So what an inspiring story the Brian Dean one is. From parent’s basement to multi-million dollar buyout!
Brian is pleased that SEMrush will be continuing its mission to help more people come to terms with SEO and help them achieve success.
How Does Backlinko Help?
Backlinko gives you access to a lot of information and practical help in achieving your SEO goals. If you’ve been involved with Online Marketing and SEO for any length of time you know that unfortunately ranking for keywords with traffic isn’t all about “build it and they will come”. If only it were that easy!
And that is where Backlinko comes in. This blog is where Brian Dean shows you how to get higher rankings and increase visitors across websites. The tips, strategies, and techniques without any filler. Just advice that works that you can into action right away.
If you haven’t already signed up for the Backlinko newsletter then you really should do that next. You don’t want to miss out on anything that Brian puts out.
Why SEO Is Essential For Online Businesses?
Remember in the beginning, Brian said that he knew he couldn’t afford to go down the PPC route as he started with no funding. Why would paid advertising be the primary method that people want to use on the internet?
A reason for this is that PPC produces instant results and many business owners believe that puts them on the “fast path” to success. However, although some have instant results, it takes many people years of continuously losing money to create an effective campaign. Many lose money until they are able to work it all out.
SEO, on the other hand, lets you rank your website on search engines without the need to pay for advertisements.
There are a few benefits to this:
- It’s absolutely free
- Your position is enduring (it will not go away if you keep doing effective SEO)
- You are the owner of your flow of traffic (if you’re doing all the correct things)
However, SEO is not only time-consuming to do, the results take time to show as well. SEO and content marketing is a process that takes time and there’s no method of cheating the system to speed things up.
Google is always making changes to the algorithms it uses to measure a ranking signal which will, in turn, affect the ranking of a website, and is constantly looking for methods that make it harder for people to game the system. What this accomplishes is that it helps to identify those who truly understand SEO and gets rid of those who don’t.
How Backlinko Can Help You Understand SEO?
Let’s discuss specifically Backlinko today. You go over there, and you end up on the homepage. The blog’s homepage is greeted with a warm welcome from Brian Dean right at the top of the page, and you’ll see it is incredibly minimal.
It’s “a blog” filled with useful and free tips to rank you on Google but not a lot more. Brian delivers tremendous value with actionable tips and advice on a list of SEO subjects that include; link-building strategy, long-form content, the correlation between keyword phrases, social media sites, Domain Authority, guest posts, and the list goes on. And he is willing to give all this away for free!
You can access all this information for free on the site instead of spending money on a course. There is nothing else you need in terms of SEO aside from the information Brian is providing here on Backlinko.
So What Does Backlinko Cover?
On-page SEO
One of the things you’ll find on the site is Brian’s on-page SEO tutorial which he updates each year. This guide will teach the reader how to improve the quality of your content and the way that you format and publish it.
For those who aren’t aware, On-page SEO uses all the information available on your site for optimizing your site’s content for search engines. This could include title tags, blog posts internal links, URLs Meta descriptions, title tags, Schema Markup, and so on.
Good on-page SEO will mean you see a rankings boost and more views per month as a result of increased search visibility and search volume.
These elements have a lesser effect on SEO than they did in the past and aren’t as significant, but they’re still an important element and must be taken into consideration when you’re committed to ranking your website.
One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is the meta description and title tag. This is the word that pops up whenever you Google something, and you’re scrolling through the results to choose which site to visit.
Not only will your title tag influence SEO on Google but it also improves the user’s experience. If you wrote an article on the best food choices for your dog, and the title tag mentions cats it’s unlikely to attract a large number of people to click through this blog, right?
Brian goes over this entire process in great detail and offers concrete steps that you can follow to boost each part of your on-page SEO on the web.
Link Building
Backlinko will help you learn more about how to use link building to boost your website’s search engine performance. This is another guide that Brian updates and publishes on his website every year.
He covers:
- Link building fundamentals
- How can you locate high-quality links?
- Marketing content
- Email outreach
- Links with black hats
- Link strategies for building
- Case studies
- Advanced link construction
With the name Backlinko, you could think of him as the authority in link development.
The guide is packed with helpful information on one of the biggest and most challenging areas of SEO.
The term “backlink” refers to a hyperlink on someone’s site that links to your website. For example, if I hyperlink to Brian’s website it would be a backlink for Brian.
If a website is able to boast lots of backlinks, Google considers it a website with high authority because lots of users are linking to their content.
Start with a Backlink Audit to find any toxic backlinks. Building spammy links to the wrong type of site can damage your ranking as effectively as low-quality content.
Google says, “well, many people are liking this site then it must be helpful for them. Let’s use it to help more people with similar search queries.”
Google considers a backlink to be a “Thumbs Up” for the target site and as a result, the website with the most backlinks is likely to outrank sites that do not have many links.
Google has always used hyperlinks as an important ranking factor but due to their abuse, they are not as important as they once were. Google uses algorithms to try and work out who is attempting to scam the system and that makes the old process of just throwing loads of backlinks at a site obsolete. In fact, now an influx of links that contain a hi8gh number of toxic links will do damage to your Domain Rating.
When your material is excellent, people will link to it. If your content isn’t good, no one will be able to link to it.
Content marketers should focus on providing; amazing content, relevant content, high-quality content, and comprehensive content that truly adds value to any organic traffic arriving from a search engine. Quality over quantity will result in extra views.
Backlinks aren’t an easy way to cheat the system. You need to know what Google is looking for and build backlinks carefully. Backlinko will share the knowledge on how to do this properly.
Keyword Research
A third and crucial factor in ranking websites is effective keyword research. You will learn about the Backlinko keyword research techniques that Brian employs in order to position his content while also creating content of the highest quality.
A few years ago, if you wanted to be ranked in the search results for “SEO for novices” on Google then you could use the phrase 45,000 times and you’d be ranked in the top spot within a couple of days. This was known as keyword stuffing and search engine optimization was easy.
Google has now tackled the problem head-on and you must make more strategic use of keywords. In order to receive lots of views from search engines, you need to answer the search query in detail, with relevant content that covers if not the entire topic, a fair proportion of it.
Brian will show his students how to study and locate the keywords that will drive traffic even from competitive keywords.
You’ll be taught more about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. LSI Keywords are conceptually related terms that search engines use to more deeply understand the content on a webpage. It uses related words and phrases to better categorize blog content.
You will also find out about long-tail search terms, essential to know if you intend to move a website to the first page of search engine results. It’s easier to rank a piece of content for a target keyword if that target keyword has less competition. Long-tail keywords generally have less competition.
Brian will show students how to be found for any keyword they’d like so long as they use the right strategies.
What’s The Definition Of A Keyword?
The term “keyword” refers to the word or phrase that searchers will use on Google in order to locate details.
For instance, I may search for the “best software for landing pages.” That is my search term.
If someone wants to rank a blog post using that phrase and wants to increase their chances of ranking, they must include that keyword throughout the text and also in headers, metadata, alt tags as well as title tags. Backlinko will teach you how to know how many times and where they should appear.
But the learning doesn’t stop there. Alongside using anchor keywords, Brian teaches you how to identify additional keywords which complement the primary one to boost your site’s traffic.
Conclusion – How Backlinko Can Help You Improve Your SEO
Backlinko is an invaluable aid to tackling SEO effectively. To get so much valuable help and advice for free is indeed a rarity these days.
You will soon have an understanding of backlink profiles, broken links, Outbound links, and Contextual Links and know how to put together an effective link-building campaign.
There are many link-building opportunities if you know where to look. High-quality backlinks are now more important than ever but at the same time, black hat link building can do so much more damage than before.
Links from sites that are not relevant to your content will have little value. There are so many types of backlinks and Brian will show you how to use a backlink checker or backlink tool to check for bad links or dead links.
Building backlinks is not as easy as it once was. An inbound link can also be a problem if it has the wrong link profile. He will also show you how to do competitor backlink analysis so you can see if they have any links you should be trying to get to such as backlinks from authority sites or authority news sites.
Although the man behind the launch and establishment of Backlinko, Brian Dean, may have sold his baby to SEMrush, he will still be around to ensure continuity of the site’s main ethos; to help people understand SEO and what they need to do to improve the ranking of their website.
Sign up now for their free newsletter and get a leg up over the opposition. Every little bit helps.
