The SEO game is always changing, and things you once practiced may not be as effective nowadays. That’s why you need to stay up-to-date when it comes to link building strategy, to make sure you’re doing the right thing for your website. Apart from knowing all the good practices of link building, you need to be aware of the things you shouldn’t do. For that reason, we’ve created a simple guide. Learn about ten top link building mistakes, and what are the ways to avoid them. Let’s start!
Why focus on link building methods?
Many website owners underestimate the power of link building. However, the quality of your backlinks can affect the rankings, and therefore the traffic on your website. Ultimately, your backlink strategy can help or hurt the overall sales on your website. That’s why learning about these mistakes will help you avoid them and make your website even better. You don’t need to learn from your own mistakes, learn from our guide!
Most important link building mistakes
Now let’s cut to the chase. Here are the ten most important link building mistakes you should avoid in your SEO strategy.
1. Link purchasing
One of the practices everyone should abandon is buying backlinks. Being a black hat SEO tactic, this practice should be avoided for various reasons. Even though buying quality links is an easier thing to do, it can actually do more harm to your website. Search engines don’t ‘like’ these links and they give little value to your content.
Paying someone directly to link your website is not a good practice, and there’s a good reason for it. The services that offer these services are often not writing good-quality content, which you don’t want to be associated with your website. Furthermore, you can get a penalty from Google – which is certainly something you should avoid. The thing to do instead – create high-quality content to help others notice you and link to your site naturally.
2. Not focusing on the content as one of the biggest link building mistakes
Whether you like it or not, high-quality content is what drives your website, brings more links, and therefore increases sales. Offering poor-quality content, on the other hand, minimizes the chances of natural link building and in that way decreases your website’s ranking. To avoid one of the most common link building mistakes is to create content that answers your customers’ questions and meets their needs. Do some research on your potential customers to be able to write about their favorite topics that are relevant to your business. When it comes to link building, the more is not always the merrier. so don’t go for quantity over quality.
3. Not using diverse links
Automatically using only one link type. It can either be just the link to your home page or any other link, but that’s one of the biggest link building mistakes. Apart from being dull to the readers, it’s also suspicious to Google. That’s why you should diversify the choice of links you use, and focus on some pages you haven’t promoted enough.
4. Keywords mistakes
Another important factor of every successful SEO strategy is the careful choice of keywords. One of the most common mistakes that happen with keywords are:
- using the same keywords too often. Backlinks are about diversity, and so are keywords. Do some research on variations of your business name, related terms, and other words, so you can avoid anchor text overload;
- using unrelated keywords – the whole point of using keywords in your content is to promote a certain topic related to your niche. That’s why keywords shouldn’t be pointless – make sure you use related terms that show what the page your linking to is about.
5. Getting links from irrelevant websites
One of the ways to get more link juice is to get links from relevant, high-quality websites. That’s why you should avoid websites that are irrelevant to your niche, offer little content, unsecured sites, directories, etc. Using these will affect your ranking in a negative way, so the effort will not pay off.
6. Not caring about the timing
The content you create should be useful and interesting, but also relevant to the timing and seasons. Certain articles would be more interesting in a certain season, so don’t be afraid to wait to post it at the right time. Consider holiday seasons, weather, sports events, elections, and other important dates that are relevant to your industry.
7. Not following the progress of your links
Another link building mistake is leaving your links ‘unattended’. Make sure you check the progress and if they do well among readers. This way you can see what kind of links are more interesting and shape your SEO strategy better.
8. Uneven link usage
In the SEO world, these are called link sprints. These are sudden jumps in link usage, which can turn out to be suspicious. Make sure you spread your links and content evenly, still focusing on authoritative and relevant websites. If you’re not sure how to do that, professionals at Link Department can take care of your custom backlink plan and save you a lot of time.
9. Being part of blog networks
Blog networks exist so many sites can join and influence each other SEO ranking. Even though they claim to leave no footprint, this is actually not true. Google can track them and penalize the sites involved. Even though this seems to work for some blogs, these actions are easily trackable by Google, so you should avoid them.
10. Quitting too soon
Even though it can be time-consuming, link building is also very rewarding. However, it requires patience and time to show true results. One of the common link building mistakes is that users give up on some good strategies if they don’t see immediate results. Therefore, they just waste time and shift to another, less successful strategy. Keep up the good work and focus on the quality of your SEO game. Good luck!