Common Link Building Mistakes

This is a guest post from Chung Bey Luen. He blogs about SEO tips at BlogHighlight. Like to contribute an article? Click here to contribute.

One of the very important activity in SEO process is link building. In order to increase search engine rankings and traffic, many webmasters make a big effort and money to build inbound links to their websites.

However their link building efforts are often ineffective due to common mistakes. Worst case is your websites will get banned by Google. Here are some of those common mistakes which can be avoided.

#1 Quality Over Quantity

Many people think that more links are better. But it is not the case. Search engines pay a lot of attention on the quality of links. A link from a authority website is much better than 30 or 40 links from low quality and spammy websites.

You could even get penalized. Search engines might think that your site is a spammy website if there are lots of spammy websites linking to you. Go for quality instead of quantity. Guest posting is a good way to get quality links.

#2 Irrelevant Anchor Text

Quality links are good to your websites. Without proper anchor text in the text links, they are worthless. If you have the control over the inbound links, try to include your targeting keywords in the anchor text instead the name of your site. For example, try to use Make money online instead of Gather Success.

You can also try to use different keywords in the anchor text for different links. It will make your site ranked well for more keywords.

#3 Paid Links

Google did mention several times in the public that it does not like paid links. Google thinks that paid link should not contribute link juice and pass through PageRank. Once Google find out you are buying links, you will get penalized heavily.

Google has established channel for people to feedback or report paid links. Do not buy links unless you would like to take risks. Natural links is the best.

#4 Weak Internal Linking

Internal linking is also an important element in the SEO implementation. Search engines not only rank a web page base on inbound links but also count the total number of internal links. When we are writing content, we should always keep internal linking in mind where we can include a link in our post pointing to another post with relevant content.

You can also consider putting most popular posts and recent posts in your sidebar. They are not only good for SEO purpose but also make your visitors stay at your site longer by serving them the best content.

#5 Only Linking To Homepage

If you are having all links pointing to your homepage, then your homepage will have higher chance to get good ranking. With just 1 page, you can’t target as many keywords as you want. The solution is try to use different pages for different targeting keywords. In this case, you will have better chance to rank more keywords in search engines.

If you have more keywords that get well rankings, then all your keywords will get benefited by having even higher rankings. Ultimately it can bring you more traffic.

Conclusion

Link building is a key factor in SEO cycle. We should avoid those common mistakes which are wasting our efforts and could even make our websites get penalized. Start today to build better links for better rankings.

Do you have any other common link building mistake? Please feel free to share with us.

About The Author

Chung Bey Luen is an online entrepreneur from Singapore. He is focusing on providing SEO tips at BlogHighlight. In addition, he is the creator of Definitive WordPress SEO Guide

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