Blog Audit Challenge 2021: May Challenges (external links) | Jo Linsdell

Blog Audit Challenge 2021: May Challenges (external links)

    

Blog Audit Challenge 2021: May Challenges


Blog Audit Challenge 2021


Welcome back for another month of challenges for the Blog Audit Challenge 2021! I hope you did well with the April challenges. Remember to link up your progress in the April Linky

Each month we'll concentrate on a different area of our blogs.

The Challenges:


January- The Competition
February- Legal Aspects
March- Branding 
May- External Links
June- SEO 
July- Content Promotion 
AugustTechnical Errors
September- Readability 
October- Follow Options
November- Security
December- Know Your Stats


Monthly link ups

In order to keep us all on track, and give us a way to see each others progress, I'll be hosting link ups on the first Saturday of every month where participants can share their links and discuss their progress. 


#BlogAuditChallenge2021

May Challenges


Our focus for May is on external links.

If another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. Similarly, if you link out to another website, this is also considered an external link.

Getting external links is one of the most important ways for attaining high rankings. External links are one of the hardest metrics to manipulate and therefore are one of the best ways for search engines to determine the popularity of a given web page.

Whilst each external link functions as a popularity vote for your blog post, the algorithms of the big search engines use a lot of different metrics to determine the value of external links. 

The trustworthiness of the linking domain. This is measured by Domain Authority (DA Score). DA score ranges from 1 to 100. Generally speaking, sites with a very large number of high-quality external links are at the top end of the Domain Authority scale.

The popularity of the linking page. The more popular the page is that links to you, the better it is for your blog.  

The anchor text used in the link. When adding external links to your own blog it is much better to use keyword rich terms that are relevant to the content of the link than just a vague "Click here". The same applies for when other sites include external links directed towards your blog.

For more factors and information I suggest reading the post External Links by Moz. I also suggest reading their Beginners Guide to Link Building.


The May challenges:


1.  Check which sites are linking to your blog.


It's always good to know who is linking to your site. Moz is my go to site for checking site DA scores and linking domains. They offer several free SEO tools.


2. Try to get external links from other high authority pages


Getting external links from other high authority pages acts as "votes of confidence" for the authority of your page. Reach out to other bloggers to see if they would be interested in inserting an external link to one of your blog posts on their site. This could be on their resources page or within a specific blog post. 

For better link juice target sites that have the same DA score or higher than your own. For example, my DA score is currently 32. I'll be targeting sites with DA scores of 32 or higher. 

If you write informational posts it shouldn't be too hard to find bloggers willing to link to your post. 

For example, for my post The Ultimate Guide for Book Bloggers I'll reach out to book bloggers. As the post contains a wide variety of tips and information for people considering starting a book blog but also for book bloggers that have been doing it for a while, it's a high value post that is easily linkable in any blog post with a connection to book bloggers or book blogging.

Posts related to the Blog Audit Challenge would fit well on any blog, or in posts about blogging.

For other posts I'll need to be more specific. For example, for my post 30 Booktubers You Need To Watch I'll reach out to other Booktubers who also blog their video content. 

For book reviews I can reach out to other book bloggers that have reviewed the same book or other books by the same author/ from the same series. 

Alternatively you could try guest blogging. This is where you write a blog post that is then published on another bloggers site. In most cases the hosting site will give a link back to your site in the post. 


N.B. You want them to be using DoFollow links.


What are Do Follow links?

Follow links are links that count as points, pushing SEO link juice and boosting the page rank of the linked-to sites, helping them go higher in the SERPs as a result.

 

What are No Follow links?


A no follow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, does not boost PageRank, and doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs... The nofollow tag is basically a notice sign for search engines saying “don’t count this.” 


For more information about follow links and no follow links check out this article Follow Links Vs. No Follow Links: Should You Care? by WordStream




Don't forget to promote your participation in the Blog Audit Challenge 2021 by using the following graphic in any blog posts you do connected with the challenge along with a link back to this site. 

Blog Audit Challenge 2021: A Challenge for Bloggers


Save the Date:

The monthly link up post for sharing your May progress will be on 5th June. The June challenges will be posted on 2nd June. 





Blog Audit Challenge 2021: May Challenges



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10 comments

  1. Although I am not participating in the challenge, I am going to try follow the suggestions.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Thanks great Nadene. You're welcome to join in the months of the Blog Audit Challenge that focus on the things you want to improve on your blog. You don't need to join in every month to be able to join in with the challenge. I'm glad you found the information useful.

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  2. There is one publicist who links back to me on their blog tours and it took me a bit to understand why that was. But it is a kind thing to do for bloggers

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    1. It's the basics of good blog etiquette. If someone features you on their blog you at least give them a shout out on yours. It's a win-win for both bloggers.
      Every company that organises book tours should be linking to all the stops on each tour.

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  3. I love these SEO tips. I’m always trying to better mine, so thanks for this post!

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    Replies
    1. I'm so glad it was helpful. I'm a bit obsessed with SEO and always looking for ways to improve my own. As the rules of SEO are always in evolution there's never time to get bored either 😉

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  4. I love your monthly challenges. At the moment I am currently going back over old book reviews (not easy when there is over 2,000 of them). Making sure all links work, that they contain the relevant legal things that should be on a post. It's a pain but needed. My DA score is all over the place at the moment and it is driving me mad. Checked it a couple of weeks ago and it was at 29, then went to 32, then 34. Last check it was at 29 again. Grrr

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    Replies
    1. I'm doing the same. It's a big job when you have as many blog posts as we do. It's worth it though.
      DA scores can go up and down quite a bit. They take into account a lot of different factors and so can vary at times. Any changes made to a site will also take a week to two to show in the results so it's hard to tell what exactly made the difference. If your score is going up and down between 29 and 34 the most accurate score is probably somewhere in the middle of the two.

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  5. oh my, this reminds me that I am so so behind on this challenge.. catchup time now..

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  6. Perhaps I will participate in this challenge in 2022. There simply are not enough hours in the day.

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