Experienced or not, some of the most seasoned SEO professionals tend to make mistakes. This can be disastrous especially when it comes to quality link building. To prevent this from happening, SEO professionals need to educate themselves about common link building mistakes so they can avoid them and not get penalized for their work.
Link building should be an essential part of every SEO campaign. However, building links mindlessly can do more harm than good. If you’re serious about building quality links, you need to follow specific link building guidelines and also do your best to avoid making mistakes that will penalize your link building efforts.
Here are the top 7 link building mistakes you need to avoid when running an SEO campaign.
1. Getting Irrelevant Backlinks
This is the most common mistake people make when building links. When hunting for backlinks, you need to think beyond the number of backlinks you need.
Getting hundreds of backlinks may sound great, but in reality, they are useless if they are from irrelevant sites.
You need backlinks that are relevant and are related to your niche. For instance, if you have a website about car accessories, you need to target blogs related to cars.
Getting relevant backlinks is tough, but getting a few high-quality links beats thousands of links from random sites any day.
2. Linking to Ill Reputed Sites
When building links, stay clear of ill-reputed sites. Sites with a terrible or bad reputation do more harm than good.
If you do link to these sites and/or endorse them, Google will penalize you. For this reason, you need to check every site you plan to put a link on.
There may be instances where sites might offer to pay you for putting a link to their site and you might be tempted to do this, but keep in mind that Google will likely take notice and penalize you resulting in lower rankings.
Once your website is flagged or gets a bad reputation, it will take a long time to fix the damage. So stay away from these sites and do research on each one before linking to them.
3. Not Creating Quality Content
Creating low-quality content will not help you build links. No one wants to link to poor quality content.
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Inexperienced website owners create poor badly written content for the sake of SEO. They focus on quantity rather than quality. Do not be one of those website owners.
Remember, longer blogs are better attracting links than shorter ones. You have room to play with integrating more keywords, and it does not make your content feel forced or cramped either.
No matter what happens, do your absolute best to deliver high-quality content. Even if you are starting out, focus on creating quality content rather than on getting backlinks. By creating content that truly matters, you will get all necessary backlinks, but only if others consider you content deserving of links.
4. Failing to Maintain and Update Links
Getting quality links does not mean your job is done. For every link you make, you need to maintain them as well.
Some delete websites, some may delete their posts, some may change your link to ‘no follow’.
To make sure your links work properly and continue to count, check them regularly. There are many tools such as Backlinks from Neil or Free Backlink Checker from ahrefs.
5. Selling Links
Selling links is one of the worst things you can do for your website. Doing so may negatively affect your site’s rankings. Despite knowing this, webmasters do indulge in making extra cash on the side by selling links on their websites.
If you really want to sell links, there is a proper way to do so. You can check sites like Backlinks.com where you can buy and sell links. It is worth noting that paid link networks tend to hide the fact that the links are paid for and if Google finds out the links were paid for, you might get penalized, so think twice before you go through with it.
6. Poor Anchor Text
Getting your links placed on high authority sites can get you valuable traffic while keeping you at the very top in search engine results.
However, it’s important to keep in mind that if you choose poor anchor texts your link might not be as valuable as you want it to be. Links that are non-descriptive and generic, don’t help your link building efforts. Nobody clicks a link with text like ‘click here’. These vague anchor texts do not help users and result in poor user experience.
People do not like to waste time. If you fail to give to provide an accurate description of the link, you will lose out on valuable SEO and traffic.
If you want your readers to click on your links, make sure the anchor text is relevant and interesting.
7. Lack of Personalization during Outreach
When reaching out to different site owners, the bland non-personalized email won’t’ do. Also, flattery has been overused and no longer gets the results it used to. Telling site owners how great their content is and how much you enjoyed it does not help anymore.
By using the same old templates, you do not come across as unique. To make a personal connection, your outreach template must be personalized to every person to whom you’re reaching out. So delete the generic template, learn about the person you’re contacting and personalize your emails so they notice that you’re not one of the hundreds of marketers whose emails they get on a daily basis asking for links.
To get more traffic and get a higher ranking, you need to be persistent and proactive when building links. It’s easy to make mistakes, which can cost you valuable traffic and business. Learn as much as you can about SEO and link building strategies so you can avoid making these costly mistakes.
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