7 Common Link Building Mistakes You Should Avoid in SEO

If you want to Future-proof Your SEO, Be Aware of These 7 Common Link Building Mistakes You Should Avoid.

 

7 Common Link Building Mistakes You Should Avoid in SEO

There are various ways for website owners to build links. But because of the diversity, people are also prone to committing link building mistakes.

 

While it is not necessarily a bad thing, these mistakes can lead to lost opportunities. And when not resolved immediately, you might be penalized for it.

 

Luckily, you can avoid that by learning the typical link building mistakes you should avoid. That way, you have a better idea of how you can future-proof your SEO efforts.

1. Linking to lousy website

Just because a website has high domain authority or traffic does not mean you should earn links from it. Otherwise, it will not have an impact on your SEO efforts.

 

Your website might even receive penalties if you are not careful.

 

Quality link building means receiving links from relevant websites. These are websites that are in the same niche as yours.

 

And aside from their DA and traffic, you should also check their link profile. If they publish content related to drugs or gambling, it would be best to ditch them.

2. Buying or selling links

Buying links might be relatively a shortcut in winning Google’s election. But if you don’t know whether or not that links you’ll be buying work, this could hurt you in the long run.

 

So, if you’re searching for useful links, one of the safest and most effective ways is to do guest blogging instead.

 

What you can do is look for websites that are relevant to your niche. Reach out to them and ask if you can submit guest article on their website. From there, you can create content and link back to one of the resources on your website.

 

The key here is writing a high-quality that would showcase your knowledge and expertise and would be beneficial to other audience. That way, the website owner will likely publish your content, allowing you to earn some backlinks.

3. Getting no-follow links

The no-follow tag is used to tell search engines to now crawl particular backlinks. Back then, it was used to combat spam comments, but this didn’t quite work out well. 

 

Now, it’s used to identify content you don’t trust and then highlight paid links. 

 

Many people will say that no-follow links don’t hurt your rankings, but it’s not always the case. In small quantities, there will unlikely cause any issues. That’s because the main idea is to tell search engines and not links. 

 

But in larger quantities, these can be low quality, leading to issues. Although they make your link profile more natural, they don’t offer a lot of SEO value. Instead, you might want to focus on acquiring do-follow links instead. 

4. Getting irrelevant backlinks

Although high-quality backlinks are great, the most important thing is getting relevant links.

A lower quality niche site can do as much, or even more than that, as a high-quality site that’s not even relevant to your niche in the first place. 

5. Not using your anchor keywords

Anchor text plays a vital role in the ability of your site to rank for particular keywords

 

Your target keywords have to be used as anchor text for incoming links rather than the name of your site and company name. 

 

Although your brand an anchor plays a crucial role in having a healthy and natural link profile, you shouldn’t forget to use your keywords. 

6. Forgetting to break things up

Huge chunks of content can easily overwhelm your readers. As a result, they could easily get overwhelmed and bored, eventually causing them to leave your site.

 

A lengthy guide with solid chunks of texts wouldn’t persuade anyone to link to your site. In the same way, a reader could easily get lost in a lengthy infographic. 

 

Invest in long-form, yet easy-to-digest, content. You can also opt to consider the following:

 

  • Investing in some design elements to the page.
  • Creating custom navigation.
  • Adding a video and several short infographics.

7. Not monitoring new backlinks

Don’t just think of SEO. Whether your link is a do-follow or no-follow, a backlink is excellent when it comes to sending traffic to your site.

 

It helps you always try to monitor which links send the most traffic to your business and then do your best to replicate the most important ones. 

 

Over to You

There’s no shortcut if you want to make long-lasting SEO results.

 

Sure, getting links from any website is vital. But if it is irrelevant or undesirable, you might end up receiving penalties. And this can hurt your entire digital marketing efforts.

 

That said, it would be best to keep these common link building mistakes in mind:

 

  1. Linking to lousy websites
  2. Buying or selling links
  3. Getting no-follow links
  4. Getting irrelevant backlinks
  5. Not using your anchor keywords
  6. Forgetting to break things up
  7. Not monitoring new backlinks

 

The key to proper link building is creating link-worthy content. That’s because it will be easier for you to reach out to relevant and top-performing websites and ask for link opportunities.