it does make sense, but you need to take it easy (get only a handful of links in the first 2-3 months, say 2-5 links for example), and then increase gradually as your site grows bigger in content and traffic.
By the way, you might also need to justify the links with traffic, otherwise - when a page has zero visitors - it makes no sense to have backlinks because who's going to link to that page when nobody sees it? Be smart about it and you should be able to pull through
unless you know SEO I don't think this is possible. The best you can do is use trusted sources, but again, how you can know which sources are trusted when you're a newbie I couldn't say. So, in the end, it still comes down to learning the tricks of SEO.
You can ask the sellers for sample backlinks and tell them politely that if the samples don't match what you'll be buying from them you will ask for a refund. Telling this to them upfront deters a lot of sellers from screwing you over, or wanting to have to deal with you in the fist place, but the good news is that the few sellers that will agree to this are almost always the genuine ones, and they can be trusted.
But then again, if you do say this to them you need to be able to assess the quality of the links you're buying, otherwise - even if the sellers do deliver on their promises - you might still get links that are too weak for your specific niche / keywords.
So, in the end, you still need to know SEO to avoid wasting money on stuff that doesn't work. And speaking of learning SEO, these tips on link building might come in handy:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/guide-how-many-links-per-day-week-or-month-should-i-build.1502403/
If you want to make sure you get only the best links ever, what I recommend is that you focus only on links that...
a) come from sites that rank in google and have been getting decent, constant traffic over the last 3-4 months without these sites' rankings, indexed pages, ranked keywords, or organic traffic showing downward trends.
If you find such sites (especially if they're in the same niche / industry as you), you're guaranteed to land quality backlinks
b) come from pages with decent authority and decent traffic (decent authority I'd say at least 10 UR, but that's my personal low threshold, if you have a different number in mind that's fine.... and decent traffic - again, for me personally, you don't have to agree with this - is at least 10-20 visitors a month to that page either from other pages on the same site, or from other trusted sources. or - ideally - from both)
c) and speaking of relevancy, the links should come from sites that are in the same niche / industry as yours, or - if that's not possible - the pages themselves on these sites should - whenever possible - have some relevancy to the content on the page that you're linking to.
For example, let's say you have a website about pets, and - through some odd chance (highly unlikely, but for the sake of this example let's assume that this is true) - you can't find other sites in the pets niche to get backlinks from, but you do find a site about insurance that agrees to sell you a guest post.
Well, you could offer to write the guest post yourself and you can write about insurances on pets. If you do this, both you and the insurance website where your post will be published will have met the desired requirements because that website gets a post on insurances (which is their main industry) while you get a link from a pets-related article, which is your main industry.
So, even if the 2 sites are totally unrelated, as long as your backlinks come from relevant PAGES will still tick the topical authority checkbox. But you'll have to convince the guest post seller (of the insurance website) to let you write the guest post yourself (so you can write about pets insurance), or to convince them to write about pets insurance themselves.... if that's not possible, you should at least ask them politely to write about something that's even remotely related to your niche (pets), which could be, for example, content on lawsuits against pet toy companies, or laws on pet care in your county, etc...
d) come from authority sites.
Authority is almost always given by the number and quality of backlinks that a site has, and - as always - the higher the authority of a website, the better the backlinks you get from that website are.
Now, what good authority means for you might be different from what it means for me. For example, I've oftentimes didn't mind getting links from sites with only 5-10 DR as long as the sites were in good standing with google (had rankings and traffic and they weren't on a downward spiral) and they were at least somewhat related to the niche of my site.
If these 2 conditions were met (and as long as the my backlinks weren't nofollow, of course) I didn't mind getting links from a DR 5 website.
But for some people this might be too low, so find sites that have the minimum amount of DR that you're comfortable getting links from. But I personally wouldn't go below 5 DR to be honest...
If you manage to find sites that tick all of these 4 checkboxes you will be able to land very good links indeed. But be prepared to pay up as quality links cost good money nowadays, so unless you have your own PBN or partnerships with link providers, you might need to set aside a hefty monthly budget for your link building campaigns as free links rarely cut it nowadays....
with
on-page and
on-site SEO, of course.
The good news is that - in some cases - google does reward on-page + on-site SEO more than backlinks (usually in easy niches and / or with low commercial value), so if you're in such a niche there are things you can do to get the edge over your competition if you can't / don't want to do link building (although, at some point, you will still need to start acquiring links, so this is not a successful long term strategy, but it can get you going in the beginning for a few months)...
On-page things you can do...
a) make quality content
By quality content I don't mean write 1000s of words that no one reads just so you can "have content". The quality of your content will be decided by analyzing the intent behind the keywords you're targeting, as well as by analyzing the content of your competition for those keywords.
For example, if you write content around a keyword like "can snakes eat hamsters?", the content can be as simple as a single word: YES (because snakes do indeed eat hamsters) since this single word already meets the intent of the keyword (the intent in this case being the fact that people simply wish to know whether or not snakes eat hamsters, most of the people who look up keywords like this in google will probably not give a rat's ass - pun intended - about the history of hamsters, or the diets of snakes or whatever).
So, for such a keyword, a simple word like "yes" will have already addressed the intent, but you obviously can't make a page for this keyword and your entire content on that page will be the word "yes". That'd be silly... and I don't even think you can rank with such a page without enough site authority and trust, or without proper black hat...
Anyway, for such a keyword - to create a decent amount of content - you could dive deeper into the topic by mentioning how most snakes do eat hamsters but there might be some snake species that never eat hamsters (or rodents in general), and why they're so pretentious... you could also touch upon the nutritional differences in hamsters (as food for snakes I mean) and other rodents, or other critters, etc... Just do some research on the topic and you'll be able to find some info to make a decent (500-600) long article that can constitute "quality content" for this particular keyword...
For other keywords (tourism guide in Bangkok, for example), you can easily write 5-6000 words long article on this topic since you can touch on so many sub-topic of this big, broad topic, and you can use lots of images, stats, tables, schedules for hotels, taxi stations with their tariffs, etc.... If you do research correctly you will be able to easily write 5000 words on this keyword, and you should write a lot of content on this keyword if you wish to fulfill its intent as google expects you to...
So, addressing the intent of the keyword is part 1 of the "quality content" bullet point.
Part 2 would be to use LSI terms and relevant SEO entities (to do semantic SEO in a nutshell.)
Now, if you have access to tools like Frase.io, SurferSEO, Scalenut, NeuronWriter, etc... these services (albeit very expensive for many people), can help you optimize your content for google with the right LSI terms and SEO entities, so - if you have the money to pay for these services - you should definitely use them before you publish any piece of content on your site. Otherwise - if these tools are out of your reach - you can use the free tips that SEO plugins like Rank Math or Yoast provide, but these tips are oftentimes incomplete and / or outdated, so don't be surprised if your content is not up to snuff despite of RM / Yoast marking it as 100% optimized
b) optimize the content by following the recommendations of tools that I've mentioned above, but also
optimize your images (keyword the name of the images, use keyword in image ALT tag, compress the image and turn it into webp format, etc)
c) link to other relevant pages from your content, using the right anchors (branded, exact match, etc, depending on situation).
Internal linking is a big thing nowadays, it helps both your visitors to stay on your site and discover more relevant content, and it also helps the search engines to crawl other pages that might be non-discoverable otherwise (if you link to an important PDF file or podcast, for example, that you wouldn't be able to index / rank otherwise)
As for
on-site, the few things that you can do that come to mind (but there are definitely more than these) are...
a) make your site mobile friendly (it's being said that google doesn't even consider indexing sites nowadays if they're not mobile friendly and - if this is true - it means that it's a very important aspect of on-site SEO, so make sure you have a version of your site that loads on mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, etc)
b) silo / structure your site for maximum crawlability and indexability, and for the best / most friendly UX and navigation. This means...
- thinking out your site's structure thoroughly before actually making the site
- organizing all of your posts (or at least the initial ones, as you'll definitely not be able to plan out everything from the get-go for when your site gets big) into relevant and easy to navigate categories (silos)
- making ALL of your important pages reachable in maximum 3 clicks from the homepage (preferably in maximum 2 clicks from the homepage, but if that's not possible, 3 clicks will do it too)
- using breadcrumbs on your site (personally, I never liked using breadcrumbs, but since google forces behaviours in people I guess you gotta comply with their manipulation if you wish to get traffic from them)
- making a clean (clutter-free and distraction-free) and intuitive layout and design
- using schemas wherever necessary (again, something that I personally don't like implementing, but which seems important lately, so you gotta do it unfortunately)
If you need help figuring out how to silo your site check this out:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-siloing-2023-the-last-siloing-guide-youll-ever-need.1502244/
c) as mentioned earlier,
use internal linking everywhere! Link from top pages to less important pages, link from less important pages to top pages, link EACH PAGE within its silo but also cross-link between silos but only when the interlinked pages are relevant to each other, etc...
Basically, interlink the living crap out of ALL pages within the same silo (also linking to top / main pages or the homepage if needed, just don't overdo it as it's typically not needed to make internal links to the homepage if you have a good site structure), while - occasionally - also linking to pages in other silos if they're relevant.
For example, let's say you have a clothes ecommerce website, and you have 3 main categories...
- hats & caps
- jackets
- footwear
... and in both the "hats & caps" category, and the "footwear" category you have products that complement each other (for example, you have a kids' Nike cap and a kids' Nike pair of sneakers with the same design).
So, both of these similar products are into 2 different categories that have nothing in common, but in this case you can make links from the page of the kids' Nike cap to the page of the kids' Nike sneakers (and vice-versa, you can - and should - have links from both pages to each other) because they're part of the same collection, or because they have the same design or whatever the case may be.... maybe you've bundled them up together and wish to offer a discount if people purchase both of these items in one-go, but - if some people only wish to acquire 1 of these 2 items but they land on the page of the other item of the bundle - then having a link that takes them to the other item in the bundle (that they might not even know it exists) will help them discover the items that they might not know they wanted in the first place and, in this case - when google sees that the internal link had landed you a sale - google might reward both of these pages with more traffic and better rankings in the future...
So, even if you normally wouldn't make internal links to other (usually unrelated) categories / silos, in cases like this it makes sense to link to pages in other silos if the relevancy is there.
d) keep your site error free (404 pages are usually a big problem for rankings, and - as your site grows bigger and you start restructuring and reorganizing stuff around, you will inevitably end up with broken links or 404 pages, so it's best to run site auditing tools like Screaming Frog periodically to make sure that there are no technical issues with your site)
There are many more things I could write about on the topic of technical SEO, but this reply already got long enough, so I'll instead refer you to a thread that talks about this topic in a bit more detail, so start your research into topical SEO with this guide:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/technical-seo-guide-my-checklist-and-useful-tips.1389710/
And there you have it! If you don't want to / can't do off-page (which, let's be honest, most of the time this means backlinks
), you can still rank without backlinks (at least initially, in the long run you will still need backlinks I'm afraid), these on-page and on-site tricks can be a good way to kickstart your SEO game. But like I said, you gotta nail the niche + keyword research, otherwise - if you happen to choose tough niches and keywords - the lack of backlinks will only get you so far, so spend time on finding the right niche + keywords and planning your site for maximum impact, and the results will come...
