You don’t need an expert to help you (we are here if you need us), but if you are going to tackle it on your own there are 5 things that you should avoid when building backlinks if you want them to be effective.
This article will explain those mistakes and show how to do things properly to get the most out of your effort.
Link building helps SEO, only if you do it right. There are many ways to build links, but there are wrong and right ways to do so.
With many people understanding the basic concept that backlinks matter for SEO, people are looking for quick easy ways to rank. It makes sense to want to make this easier on yourself and your business by looking for quick and easy fixes.
Don’t do it.
It is better to gain solid ground, slowly with quality link building than to make the mistake of doing it inauthentically and ruining your ranking in totality with heavy penalties.
There is no quick and easy way to build backlinks and if someone says there is, know that they are full of nonsense and avoid them. They are probably a scammer.
Things that bring your business value most often will not be quick and easy and will take time. Investing in your business in ways that help your business grow in long-term quality ways is important.
1: Quick and easy backlinks will get your business penalized.
With many people understanding the basic concept that backlinks matter for SEO, people are looking for quick easy ways to rank. It makes sense to want to make this easier on yourself and your business by looking for quick and easy fixes.
Don’t do it.
It is better to gain solid ground, slowly with quality link building than to make the mistake of doing it inauthentically and ruining your ranking in totality with heavy penalties.
There is no quick and easy way to build backlinks and if someone says there is, know that they are full of nonsense and avoid them. They are probably a scammer.
Things that bring your business value most often will not be quick and easy and will take time. Investing in your business in ways that help your business grow in long-term quality ways is important.
2: Do not buy links, ever.
Buying links comes with possible life-long penalties. More than ever, that can damage your ranking indefinitely.
Again, this looks like a quick and easy way to build backlinks, but it is a Black hat SEO techniques (aka black hat SEO tactic) which means, it can get your business in a lot of trouble. Buying links is just as bad as buying Google reviews.
Black hat SEO is the practice of using unethical methods to manipulate search engines and rank higher in their results. These tactics often result in a penalty from search engines.
Paying for links creates long-term penalties.
Don’t pay for links. This is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make in your backlink strategy, and it’s definitely a red flag to Google because browsers like Google are cracking down on inauthentic link building.
Also, Google just had a huge algorithm update, called the “Helpful Content Update” that will effect this even more.
If you do pay for links, you’ll be penalized by search engines and branded as a spammer by them. In addition to this, you will lose trust with your audience.
Avoid shady link-building services and websites offering “placement” on a high-ranking directory site that has no value to your target audience. Even if the directory is focused on your target audience, please avoid them.
You don’t want to end up paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for something that doesn’t yield any value—and could actually hurt your SEO efforts if done wrong!
These types of websites and services prey on people who do not understand how damaging doing this can be to their business. Once the damage is done it is very hard to repay.
3: Linking to other high-quality websites is not backlink-building.
A common misconception with link building is that it is based on the links you put on your website that link back to quality websites and the more of those you have the better. In essence, neither of these things is actually true.
Think about this: If link building was so easy and all you needed to do was to create links on your website that went to important sites in your industry to gain ranking and authority. How easy would it be to rank high in any industry?
The real goal is to get high-ranking websites to link back to your content. Your content needs to be so solid and worth linking back to. This also help build domain authority.
According to Moz “Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs)”
This takes time but creates an important connection for Google’s ranking factors or any other browser to consider your site rank worthy.
The best link building is when high-ranking sites link back to you because you provide expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (Google E-E-A-T) in your website content.
These quality backlinks to your site are not easy to obtain but not impossible either.
4: Do not focus on link quantity.
Do not focus on link quantity. Quality is more important than quantity when it comes to backlinks. There are thousands of sites that have tons of backlinks, but no one trusts them because they are either shady or spammy.
Focus on quality links instead of just the number you can get. The best way to build a strong SEO backlink strategy is by getting only the most relevant and authoritative domains in your niche to link to your site.
Rather than just focusing on how many backlinks you can generate within a short period of time (even if those links come from low-quality sources).
Links from authoritative sites are highly valuable as they provide credibility and boost rankings faster than other types of links.
However, getting natural links from relevant yet high authority websites takes time. Yes, I know I know I keep mentioning how this is going to take time, but this is one of the most important factors (to never forget), no matter what quality strategy you implement.
Therefore, it’s better for SEO if we focus our efforts only on building these high-quality ones rather than trying everything else at once which may result in lower-quality links.
Also, if you want to boost your SEO the right ways, here are 5 tips you can use right now to boost your SEO.
5: Don’t use link wheels
Using “link wheels” is a big no-no. Link wheels are sites that automatically link to other websites (for example: from [website name] => [website name] => [website name]).
If a site has a lot of incoming links from other sites using this same structure, it can hurt its rankings because Google wants to see natural linking patterns between pages and not just one link with thousands of outgoing links pointing at it.
This is another red flag for search engines and can get your business into a lot of trouble.
Quick Tip: Don’t forget to internally link.
When thinking about backlinks, you need to have quality content on your site and a site that is easy to navigate so that other websites will want to link back to you.
Quality content is not just throwing blogs up to stay relevant, the content needs to be quality content so it can help boost your SEO and connections to others.
Create links from one page to another where it is applicable, make sure all links are there for a reason, and that you are not just stuffing link links back and forth between pages for no reason.
If the content you are linking back to on your own website is not pertinent to the original content it is better to just keep them on the page rather than sending them somewhere unnecessary which will annoy website visitors.
Linking to other sites will distract people from staying on yours. Make sure you have enough content that is focused on your industry that you can link back and forth to relevant content on your site.
It is hard work, but worth it in the long run. The longer people stay on your site, the higher you’ll rank in search engines like Google.
It’s a long-term strategy but super powerful to outrank your competitors.
Link building is a long-term strategy that can help you get more traffic and improve your SEO. It’s also a good way to build your brand by attracting new customers and improving your site’s credibility.
Now that you know how to build quality backlinks, it’s time to put this information into practice. You don’t need me to tell you that if your website is not ranking well on Google, then it will be difficult for people to find what they are looking for on your site. So start building links today!
