Link Building Dos and Don’ts for Better SEO
Getting the search engines to list you high in the results may lead to a ton of new traffic for your website. However, it’s not as simple as it might seem to get your site listed high in the rankings.
Google and other search engines use a number of different criteria to rank websites. From keyword use to incoming links to mobile friendliness, there are several things they take into consideration.
One of the most important factors is how often your site has been linked to by other sites. Whether major companies are linking to you or smaller companies, this is an important factor for overall SEO. Here are some of the dos and don’ts you should know about link building.
Defining Link Building
Link building is a set of strategies used to encourage other websites and blogs to link to your website. It’s one of the most important aspects of SEO and very time consuming. A link is a bit like a vote for your website and you need a strong campaign to get those votes.
How will Link Building Boost Your SEO?
Before the search engines began to really evolve, link building was very easy. You could simply writer a ton of blog posts, scatter in your keywords and buy a ton of garbage links to achieve high listing. However, the issue was the content was more about the search engines than providing what users want. This led to the search engines making changes to the way they rank websites.
In today’s world, content has to be useful and high in quality, and links cannot just come from anywhere. You can’t just buy content and buy links from the cheapest sources and expect to get listed high in the search engines. Some search engines even have employees ready to personally evaluate your website.
There’s a right way to build links and a wrong way. If you go about it in the wrong way, you may find your website penalized and banned from the search engines.
The Dos of Link Building
Create High Quality, Sharable Content – Content with the ability to be shared gives you all types of SEO power. When content is shared on social media, you gain links and it all happens naturally. This leads to better SEO and better ranking. Infographics, evergreen articles and many other types of content are very sharable.
Link Posts and Pages to Other Posts and Pages – When you write a blog post or a new page for your website, link it to other posts and pages whenever it fits naturally. This helps to give you better SEO by creating a good interlinking strategy for your website. You just need to make sure your links fit naturally with the content you are writing.
Create Only Quality for Your Site – A quality website is probably the most important part of any link building strategy. When you create a quality website, other bloggers will want to link to your website. They will start to look at you as a source instead of just another blog or website.
Broaden your Reach – Without much exposure, you may be left unnoticed. Use more than just SEO to find visitors. When you start to get your website visitors from other places, you will get noticed and gain more links naturally.
The Don’ts of Link Building
Buy Links – You don’t want to buy links from others places as they are often very irrelevant. They may come from a site that doesn’t make sense with your site or they may be very low in quality. Search engines look for sites that buy links and they also encourage internet users to report these sites. This may lead to a penalty and cause you all kinds of issues.
Link Drop – Link dropping is when you create a very generic comment on another blog with a link to your website. This is not only horrible for your link building efforts, but often a waste of time. Most website owners will mark these comments as spam and ban you from commenting again.
Ask for Links – You may be able to ask for links and its okay, in some scenarios. Most of the time, asking for a link isn’t a good idea. When your each out to websites and ask for a link in exchange for liking to them, it’s not going to give you much SEO power. Google calls this “link scheming” and it’s not something you want to do, as they frown upon it.
Use Low Quality Content – The quality of your content isn’t based on proper grammar, spelling and typos. Even though you want good grammar and spelling, typos are very forgivable, if the content provides useful tips, steps or information for the reader. If the reader can use the content and it delivers on the promise of the title, it’s probably high in quality.
These are just a few of the link building dos and don’ts you should follow. If you want great SEO, you want to be careful how you go about building your links.