Link building is the first and foremost tool SEO uses to improve the marketing of a webpage. It is the tools that determine the rank of a page, the traffic it gets and ultimately profit it can generate. Thus, SEO’s major activities are aimed at link building. However, even though companies can easily hire Link Department to professionally do this job, you may still do this activity themselves. Although tackling link building in DIY fashion is not that hard many people still make some mistakes. To improve your SEO you should know all about these common backlink mistakes to avoid.
Learn what are the backlink mistakes to avoid
So, if done right backlinking effort will generate customer loyalty, higher page rank, and increased traffic for a webpage and company. But, the mistakes people usually make in link building can be counterproductive. Most of the time these mistakes ruin any results the SEO has produced. In extreme cases, they may even damage the website’s position ad reputation severely. To prevent this from happening you should learn more about the backlink mistakes to avoid. Here are a few of the most common:
- Using unreliable SEO services
- Low-quality content
- Using the same landing pages
- Disregarding user intent – irrelevant links
- Disregarding on-page SEO
- Ignoring no-follow links
Using unreliable SEO services
Hiring professionals to handle your SEO and backlink building can be a good move. Hiring people that are well-versed in the matter can simplify a lot of things. However, choosing the wrong agency to do this job can spell disaster. Usually, you invest in a link-building effort that doesn’t produce results. However, sometimes that damage can be a lot worse. Bad SEO can get your website removed from search engine results or decrease your page rank. So, it is important to find a company with a good reputation and good references and experience. These companies are able to find and ensure you have good-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites.
Low-quality content
Another big mistake people make is concentrating too much on getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites while neglecting their own content. Linking authoritative sites to low-quality content can be counterproductive. Content that is not good won’t grab the attention of your target audience and it must be adequate to get backlinks. In other words, the content must be worth the backlinks you are working hard to get.
Not to mention that the quality of content is the first thing you should concentrate on. This is the main factor that will bring you organic traffic as well as organic backlinks. The content should be of the highest quality and viral. It should be timely, relevant, up-to-date, and informative. It should provide information and solve problems and issues. Any content you create should be like this. However, even if you are reaching out or purchasing backlinks the content should be of a high level. Linking from authoritative and popular websites to poor content will be counterproductive and can cause more damage.
Using the same landing pages
Creating a good landing page is important to drive traffic to your website. However, you should not limit yourself to this. You should, also try to drive traffic from informative blog posts and author bios. The point is to mix things up and try to build your trust and authority rank. Be creative and do not reuse the same old recipes.
Disregarding user intent – irrelevant links
User intent is one of the most important factors that should influence your SEO and link-building effort. However, most people disregard this user intent entirely. The majority believe that any backlink is a good backlink when reality seems to differ.
The user intent is the users’ search intent. It defines just what the user is trying to achieve with their search inquiries. When a user follows backlinks that lead them to our site he expects to find certain content of interest. However, in the attempt to build as many links as possible backlinks from irrelevant sites, we will in effect draw users that are not looking for our particular content. The service or product that we provide will not be what the user was intending to find. This means that our backlinks were irrelevant to our user and topic. Furthermore, this occurrence will spike up our bounce rate ultimately damaging our position in SERP.
Basically, this means that we should try to keep in mind our user intent and be relevant to our backlink building. The backlinks should be from our particular niche thus providing good service to the user. In addition, Google will notice this good backlink profile which will influence our rank and SERP position with Google.
Disregarding on-page SEO
On-page SEO as well as user intent and topics, meta description, and keywords are all factors that signal to Google about the webpage. All of these will influence the rank that you get from Google. Google will also take a look at the backlink profile and how it relates to the metadata of the page and its content. So, you must strive to properly handle on-page SEO and all of its elements and get backlinks that are complementary to the content you present. Any inconsistency in this respect can trigger Google to consider the backlink-building strategy as spammy or black hat practice.
Ignoring no-follow links
One more critical link-building mistake disregards no-follow links. These are the links that do not pass their link juice as they are tagged with a real”nofollow” HTML tag. As such they do not add to your page rank but they are far from being bad for you. Dofollow links do have the highest value but no-follow can add to the diversity of your website. In many ways, they can ultimately improve your rating. Basically, there is value to those links as Google will positively evaluate websites due to their diversity. This means that a healthy mixture of no follow links, do-follow links, links from social media, etc will increase the worth of your website and improve your rating.
The key to improving and building a good SEO and backlink-building effort is evaluation. You should scrutinize your activity to discover what you are doing wrong and to find ways to improve it. Knowing some of the most common backlink mistakes to avoid, but still, everyone makes, is a good starting point to improving your SEO effort.