By now you must have realized the pertinence of SEO in digital marketing. Link building is elemental for driving organic traffic through search engines within SEO. It is particularly helpful in competitive industries. Coupled with strong SEO foundations, impeccable content, and an immaculate user experience, link building can help to generate a huge amount of organic traffic on your website.
Nowadays, digital marketing and SEO is all about quality and authenticity. Low quality links and spams do help to a certain extent, but they are harmful in the long run. Therefore, it is wise to ignore spam-my link building techniques.
So what things should you keep in mind while link building? What are the Do’s and what are the Don’ts?
The Do’s of Link Building
Pay Attention to the Quality of the Content
I cannot emphasize enough. Keep the quality of the content in check. Poor quality data is off putting and chances are people will not visit your website again. High quality content shows you are committed to your business and hence towards a better user experience.
Quality data adds value to your website, as well as to the user experience. People might visit several times before actually making the purchase. When they are unable to find quality details and desired explanation of your product, or services, they are going to turn away.
Keep the Content Relevant
Link building will be successful when you keep it a two way street. Talk to your editors, bloggers and writers to link to the site on their articles. It will provide value to the audience and help drive traffic to the website.
Providing value to the audience means you have to create relevant, high quality content. Keep it apropos to the website. Do not discuss apples, when you are trying to sell oranges. Do not produce content as a sales pitch. Do not try to sell your products in your blogs. Keep it non-promotional. Keep the word count in check, and focus on updated content.
Pursue your Backlinks on Relevant Sites
Not every link is created equal. Therefore, the quality of the potential backlinks should be your priority over quantity. How?
You can pursue opportunities on various websites and publications. Such as educational websites, Governmental websites and other non-governmental organizations. Keep an eye out for relevancy and do not hesitate to exploit any opportunity given by a domain. You can set up Google Alert for your business. Whenever someone mentions your website in another site you will get an alert. You can then send them an email and ask them if the particular text could be hyperlinked. You might not get a response each time, but writing an email hardly takes more than a few minutes. It is worth the effort.
Adopt an All-inclusive Approach for link building
Everything needs time. You might become anxious. But just know that good things take time. If you are committed and really want to see results just have some patience.
Commit to building relationships with bloggers and journalists. Produce quality content consistently. You will be surprised with the results.
The Don’ts of Link Building
Do Not Indulge in Low-Quality Blogs, Mediocre Link Directories, and especially Spammed Websites
You will be tempted to increase your backlinks and build as many as possible. However, the more is not always the merrier. Do not compromise the quality at any cost for the sake of quantity. Low quality backlinks have an opposite effect. Instead of yielding more traffic, they will diminish the traffic growth. Your site will also be at a risk of getting penalized by Google if it notices a large amount of low quality links to your site.
Assess each website you might be interested in getting connected with. If you do not like their content do not get affiliated with them. Simple!
Another red flag you can look for is websites that are inundated with ads and promote obscene content such as pornography.
Do Not Opt For Specific Anchor Text
Granted suggesting specific anchor sentences and texts to webmasters was once a huge thing. Over years it has become an outdated SEO strategy. To avoid rewarding sites with awkward keyword stuffing, Google instead favors sites that promote a healthy variety of anchor texts. The wise choice would be letting the webmasters, and content writers decide what kind of anchor texts to use.
Avoid Participating in Link Exchange Schemes
Google is a wise system. It looks over everything a website does and strictly follows its set of rules. If it finds any unnatural number of links being exchanged among a few domains, it will flag it. So the best move would be to avoid using “you scratch my back, I scratch yours”, or to be more precise you link me, I will link to you.
Do not avoid it entirely, but limit this strategy to a minimum.
Take caution with paid link placements as well, as you might get penalized by Google. Only entertain such paid links that are from a reputable website and follows the demands set by Google.
Don’t Indulge in Black-Hat Link Building Tactics
We are humans, and we are always looking for an easy way out. Over the past few years, many tactics have been designed to easily improve SEO rankings through a few shortcuts. These include:
Cloaking: Where you deceive the search engines and target audience by displaying different content or even URLs
Injecting Links: It means that you hack into a website to insert your link, without them knowing
Hidden Text Links: You hide the appearance of stuffing keywords on a page to make it hard to find them, such as behind an image.
Do not manipulate Google’s SEO. It is tempting, but not worth the risk. Believe me!
Conclusion
Backlinks are imperative for SEO rankings and generating a vast traffic. Just keep these dos and don’ts in mind to pursue a healthy link building strategy to improve your website’s output.
