Setting Up Your Blog For Success
In this guide, we provide critical components required in setting up your blog for success. We break it down in simple and easy to follow steps. We into on page and off page SEO ensuring that by the end of the article you are more than well equipped to write blog posts that are engaging, well researched and optimized for both google and overall user experience.
Many people understand on a theoretically high level what a blog entails. They know that it's typically content around a specific niche or various topics. However, in recent years with the rise of affiliate networks, digital products, and high-quality ad networks more and more people have realized that blogging can become a lucrative endeavour.
In this guide, we will show you precisely what you need to do to ensure that your blog is set up for success.What To Do To Ensure You Build A Successful Blog
Before we get into the specifics. Let's keep it simple – your primary goal when creating content should be – "How can I create better, more informative content around the specific keywords".
The aim should always be focused on creating value for your readership. Nothing more and nothing less. If you focus on the user's overall experience with your content search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will pick it up and your content will rise up the search rankings.
With that being said – let's see how you can implement this in practice. 
Key Blogging Metrics
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big word for a simple concept – "How to create guides/blog posts that will rank #1 on Google (and other search engines)". Ranking on google should be the primary goal for all bloggers because it is the world's leading search engine with over 90% of the global market share as of 2021. In general, Google has over 200 metrics that it uses to measure a blog post's relevance and validity. Ultimately these parameters directly influence your blogging success.
Many people like to complicate this. It is really simple and these metrics fall into 2 categories. Namely
Onpage and Offpage SEO. For the remainder of this article, I will touch on the most relevant on-page and off-page SEO metrics you should absolutely get right if you want your blog to stand out amongst the millions of blog posts that are published on a daily basis. Off Page SEO
1. Keyword Research
There are many keyword research tools on the market, however, Ahrefs is the best for a simple reason. Apart from the google bot, Ahref's bot is the second most active crawler amongst the recognized good bots on the internet as of 2021.
Keyword research basically involves writing a piece of content in line with a specific word or phrase.
Let's use an example
As you can see in the image above all the articles are written with the keyword "Best Android Apps" in mind. Google uses the core keyword amongst other metrics to understand what the blog post is about and were it should fit in on the internet.
So if you were to construct and article about the "Best Android Apps". One of the things you must consider is to include the word : "Best Android Apps" in the main heading (H1) of your blog post.
Key Takeaway: Always include your keyword or keyword phrase in your blog posts heading.
2. Develop an outreach strategy
A key part of any successful blog is the backlink profile. This refers to the type and quantum of links that refer to a page on your website.
The key thing to remember, however, not all backlinks are created equally. The best backlink to get is from a high DR website, within your niche providing you with a contextual do-follow backlink.
There are many ways to get there, but ultimately they all converge onto one thing: relationships.
To be successful as a blogger, make sure that you are constantly in communication with bloggers within your niche. Make this a key component of your outreach strategy. When you publish really great content let the other bloggers in your niche know as well.
Obviously, not everyone will be open to linking back to your blog post or website however every now and then if you remain committed some people will – see a snapshot of the email below. 
The beautiful thing about building relationships is that the people remember you and you can always go back to them in the future with new ideas and further opportunities to collaborate.
To caveat this, not all links are built equally. Some links are better than others. Ahrefs measures the strength of a website's backlink profile via the Domain Rating (DR) measurement. Below are the Ahrefs rankings for our website 
The Domain Rating value is generally a number between 0 to 100. It is based on a logarithmic scale, meaning that a DR 60 website is exponentially better than a DR 30 website and not twice as good.
Therefore It is recommended that you focus all your energy on getting high DR links back to your website.
Many people have different interpretations of what makes a high DR website. However, anything above DR 50 is really good. Once you go above DR 75 you are dealing with the top websites in the world.
As mentioned above, developing really good content and sharing it with people within your niche is one of the ways through which you can really get these types of high-quality backlinks.
One example of a really good website that does this well in the Tools niche is ToolsGaloreHQ.com. A visit to their website and you can feel that the entire website is built and designed to improve visitors experience.
Getting contextual backlinks is not easy, however, if you produce consistently good and interesting content and combine this with an off-page marketing strategy – over time you will be able to build these links.
Key Takeaways – The two main things you should focus on for Off-Page SEO are basically link building and Keyword Research. On Page SEO
1. Create a silo structure
Remember success on your blog basically revolves around ensuring that your content features on the first page of the search engines, there is a famous saying within the online space that nobody ever goes to page 2 of Google.
So it is absolutely imperative that you structure your blog in such a manner to make it as easy as possible for the google bots to understand what your content is about and where to place it on the world wide web.
The best way to do this is to ensure that you structure your content into silos/categories.
On the page, these appear as breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs basically help the user understand where they are on your blog post in relation to the home page. See the image below for an example.
To see what this looks like in real-time action visit the link showing the breadcrumbs over here so that you can get a better feel of what it looks like.
Let's look at what not to do. As you can see in the image below. All the blog posts are practically linking directly to the home page
This is reflected with a web address that looks something link this:
www.homepage.com/blogpost1
www.homepage.com/blogpost2 etc etc
This is bad because unless your blog is about something extremely specific – it will be more confusing for the google bots to pick up what your website is about. This structure also limits you as you cannot group certain topics together hence making it very difficult to pass around authority from external links within your website.
The image above shows what a properly structured website should look like. From a user's perspective the URL's will look something like this:
www.your-website/android/BlogPost1 or www.your-website/blogging/blogpost2 or www.your-website/adsense/blogpost3 as examples.
The Key and critical to remember is to group all similar kinds of content together. This siloed structure will ensure that the google bots will be able to pick up what your content is about, thereby making it easier overall to rank your posts.
Another reason and often understated is that you can use your silo structure as part of a well-coordinated internal link-building strategy. This way you will be able to move around the authority that you are getting from external links to other articles in your silo. In the process giving positive signals to all the content within that category. See the image below for a visual representation of how this can work.
As you can see from the image above. "Blog Post 2" does not have any external links, however because of your silo structure and internal link building. The authority of the external links flows throughout your "Android" category as a whole helping google recognize that your silo or category is about android related topics. 2. Write for humans and for the google bots
It is important to remember when compiling your blog posts or guides, that you should ensure that they are written to ensure the best reading experience for humans whilst also factoring in the fact that they will be scanned by google bots.
Ultimately if your blog posts are informative and are filled with actionable content - people will stay longer on your site increasing your overall "Session Duration" and reducing your bounce rate.
These signals will indicate to Google that people are interacting with your content and will serve as a positive signal to rank your content higher.
To simply things here is a list of things to do to ensure an optimal blog post
If you perform all the tasks in this checklist, you can rest assured that your blog will be primed for success. What To Avoid When Building Up Your Blog
1. Buying unsolicited backlinks
The days of purchasing 1000's cheap links from very low DR websites, blog directories, forums or PBN's designed for link building purposes are over.
Google's search ranking algorithm has gotten really smart and in the process has penalized millions and millions of websites that have developed this link-building strategy.
Please avoid falling into this trap.
This is not to say links are not important – they are still one of the top indicators when it comes to ranking your blog on Search Engines.
The key thing is this – All the links you build towards your site should be niche relevant, high authority, contextual backlinks. Basically, it should make sense why your blog post is getting a link from a said website, and it should be relevant.
Also you truly only need about 5 – 10 backlinks a month. Large spikes are very easy for Google's algorithm to pick up and trust me you will get penalized. 2. Creating weak content
I will continue to repeat, this ultimately "content is #1". Whenever you create a blog post the first and foremost thing on your mind should always be ensuring that a visitor gets the best and most practical experience when reading your content.
A good example of great and actionable content in this article on our website. As you can see, it is actionable and practical.
Your content should also be designed to match the search intent. For example, if somebody searches "the best speakers". They are ideally looking for a page that will provide product reviews of various types of speakers. Including pros and cons, and ultimately suggestions as to which is the best.
The mistake that many bloggers make is trying to explain things like "what is a speaker" or "how does a speaker work" etc etc. As you can see these do not match search intent at all.
Anyone that will google "best speakers" knows exactly what speakers are and what they do.
Searches that include the words "best" are termed "searches with commercial intent". Such a person is ready to buy, and it is up to you to ensure that you structure your blog post to ensure that their purchasing decision becomes easy.
Another type of search intent is typically referred to as a "search with informational intent". These are searches where people have a knowledge gap around a specific topic and are looking for content that is informative to fill that gap. These search terms are typically proceeded by "how" or "what is". Examples of information search terms are listed below.
As you can see, all of these search terms are informational. People who search like this are looking for content that explains the main topic. They do not want to buy anything. So for these types of search terms be sure to create long-form content where you include pictures, instructive videos plus clear and practical examples
Overall the key thing is to avoid writing blog posts that do not match search intent. That is why as was stated above, every single blog post you write should be. Final Thoughts on Setting Up Your Blog For Success
As you can see setting up your blog post for success is not that difficult. There are a couple of steps you will need to follow as a general rule of thumb. The main thing however is to always remember that success in blogging boils down to world-class content that is designed to fulfil the search intent, combined with high quality, authoritative backlinks to your site.
