Common Link Building Mistakes
Backlinking is one of the most important ways to increase a webpage’s web ranking. In a nutshell, it means getting other websites to feature a link to your page. Search engines interpret this as a kind of “peer review” … and websites with hundreds of backlinks indicate that the content is authoritative, of interest.
However, many people think that backlinking is as simple as collecting links. It’s not that simple at all.
The first major link building mistake is to get too wrapped up in getting a lot of links, wherever or however they can be made without thought as to their quality. A good link building campaign focuses more on getting quality links. Quantity is most definitely not everything. In fact, website developers can get a much higher Google ranking from focusing efforts on a backlink from an authority website that gets millions of hits than from hundreds of poorly-placed links with websites that have unrelated content or have an almost negligible following. Of course, it is much harder to get a quality website to link back to you. That is why it’s important to build quality content, in order to get quality backlinks.
Another major mistake involves choosing the wrong anchor keywords. It’s pointless to just say, “Get more information here” or “this is really interesting article”. Very effective link building uses anchor texts (the words that represent the link) that reinforce the kind of content found in the website.
For example, a website that centers on family recipes can have a backlink that says “find recipes for picky eaters” or ”10 recipes for Thanksgiving”. Of course, website developers shouldn’t contact other websites asking them to change the title of a backlink, which can easily turn them off and prevent them from backlinking to you ever again! The best way is to choose descriptive titles for articles, which most people automatically chose as a backlink.
The third most common mistake that is made in backlinking campaigns is to make the home page the automatic target of a link, neglecting other pages in the process. While this type of strategy does improve the web-ranking of the home page, it leads to many missed opportunities. There are only so much things a homepage can offer. Other pages in the site can be interesting to other communities.
Going back to the example of a recipe website, related content, like articles on low-calorie recipes, or best convenience foods, can offer many other keywords that can appeal to fitness websites, or time management websites. Again, this goes back to developing good content.
Develop a website with this in mind, creating pages that may be interesting to several communities. A recipe website may have sections on “Kid-Friendly menus” and “Diabetic Recipes” or even “Cooking for Newlyweds” which would appeal to parenting websites, health organizations, and even wedding sites. While the link won’t lead back to the homepage, it will drive up traffic to the entire site, which will also push up Google ranking in the long run.
These are just some ways to improve a link building campaign and search engine optimization as a whole. Good luck!
Vic Carrara
Masterwebsoftware.com
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