Link building has always been a hard-earned win.
It’s one of the most well-known strategies in the world of SEO, but not everyone can get the best out of it.
A good link building practice requires a lot of hard work, patience, planning, as well as research.
Since it’s one of the most important factors Google uses to rank a site, it’s crucial for you to do it with utmost caution.
While perfect link building can help you to get a massive amount of traffic and rank higher on the SERP, doing it wrong can even get you removed from the search result.
So, before you go for it, you should know about the things you can or can’t do to make the best out of your backlinks.
While reading this article, you will learn about some of the dos and don’ts of link building that will help you to avoid some grave mistakes.
Link Building Do’s and Don’ts You Need to Know
Even a few years ago, getting a lot of links for your page would help your site rank higher on Google.
However, in recent years, Google has brought a lot of change to its algorithm, meaning that a lot of methods you used before can backfire now.
So, what are the link-building dos and don’ts you need to be careful about?
Let’s find out.
The Do’s
1. Say Yes to Guest Post
Since you’re thinking about doing some link buildings for your site, there’s no way you can do it without guest posting.
It’s one of the most effective ways to get some quality backlinks.
With a well-written, niche relevant content, you can secure a high-quality link from a website that is already ranking higher on Google.
So, you can understand how beneficial it would be if you could publish your content linking to one of your pages on their site.
How are you going to do this?
Let’s start with proper keyword research. Once you’re done with it, create a nice, long, and well-researched content that can make the publisher, as well as the readers, say WOW!
Can’t do it by yourself? OneLittleWeb has got your back.
We are a BESPOKE guest post backlink service provider that can create high-quality guest posts to get you backlinks from relevant, high-traffic sites.
Grab your first DA50+ backlink and save $199
2. Reach Out for The Publishers in Your Niche
So, you want to secure some high-quality backlinks from high-traffic websites.
How are you going to earn them if you don’t pitch the webmasters?
Once you create the content, you need to launch a blogger outreach campaign and approach the publishers with your content.
It may sound simple but the process is actually quite time-consuming since not every publisher will not respond so quickly.
You need to create a short and nice pitch where you need to explain why it would be a good idea for the webmaster to publish your content.
Be confident about your content but avoid arrogance while writing your first pitch.
Since publishers are busy and receive around hundreds of emails every day, chances are they might not notice your mail.
Send around 3-4 follow ups but don’t send them frequently. Also, try not to sound pushy since it may create a negative impression.
3. Put Quality Over Quantity
If you look carefully at your competitors’ profiles, you will see that even with fewer backlinks some of the sites are ranking higher than you?
Do you know why?
Because they put quality over quantity while scoring backlinks for their sites.
The same things should be applied to you as well.
Instead of reaping as many backlinks as possible, getting a few but quality backlinks will ensure more link juice to your webpage.
But, how do you evaluate the domain for backlinks?
Starting from the organic traffic to relevance and IP address, there are a lot of things to consider before you choose a domain for backlinks.
So, take your time and do proper research on the website before you approach the webmaster for backlinks.
Once you secure a backlink from a high-quality, you will see the result that a thousand low-quality backlinks couldn’t give you.
4. Optimize Your Site
So, you’ve created a nice content and secured a high-quality backlink from a high-quality website.
But what about your own site?
While a good backlink can ensure a huge amount of traffic from your niche, your site should be optimized properly to keep them for long.
The page you want the backlink for should be properly optimized for the target keyword.
Make sure you use a short URL containing the target keyword for your target page.
No webmaster would want to link back to your page if it’s not optimized properly, doesn’t load faster, and isn’t mobile-friendly.
So, if it’s not optimized yet, do the on-page optimization before you go for backlinks.
5. Create a Blog of Your Own
If you don’t have a blog of your own, stop doing everything, and focus on that.
Having a blog page can do wonder to your website, especially when it comes to scoring backlinks.
Want to know how?
Having a blog will give you a platform where you can constantly deliver, update, and share valuable articles.
Not only it will help your page to rank for a target keyword but also helps to gain natural links from relevant websites.
Linking to a product page or homepage doesn’t always make sense. But, if you have a blog, you can always get a quality backlink for relevant content on your blog.
6. Be Active on Social Media
While getting backlinks from social media sites won’t help you much, you should still consider being active on these platforms.
The social media platform is an excellent way to share your content and get a number of relevant audiences from there.
Sharing your content on social media can help you introduce and promote your business to a wide range of potential customers.
You can get likes, shares, and comments that will help you to get more backlinks from other high-quality websites that learn about you from these platforms.
So, while you’re busy getting backlinks from quality websites, invest some time on getting some attention on social media as well.
The Don’ts
1. Getting Links from PBNs
If you’re tempted to jump on the PBN bandwagon, stop right now!
This can be one of the gravest mistakes you’re about to while doing link building for your site.
A private blog network is basically a set of domains, which are used to build links to manipulate a site’s ranking on the SERP.
These are basically expired domains with high DA authority.
When someone gets backlinks from such sites, they immediately start seeing results due to the high domain authority of those sites.
While it sounds quite enticing, this can easily turn into a nightmare if Google catches you.
Getting backlinks from PBNs is considered as a black hat SEO technique.
You will be penalized by Google or even get de-indexed from search results if you get caught.
Proper link building may take some time but you can surely get a long term result.
So don’t opt for this quick fix unless you want to get punished by the search giant.
2. Cloaking
If you’re new to SEO, you may not have heard about this notorious practice most people do.
Cloaking refers to presenting different URLs or content to the search engines and human users.
The purpose of this practice is to deceive Google so it displays the page when it wouldn’t otherwise be displayed.
It’s a black hat technique and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines since it makes the users see different results than they expected.
While it will help you to rank your page for a certain keyword, you will soon start seeing the ranking decrease as a punishment from Google.
So, if you ever try this method to manipulate the ranking, stop doing it right now.
3. Recycling Your Content on Another Site
One of the worst link building practices that, when backfires, can cost you badly.
While writing a guest post is a great way to earn links, ensuring its uniqueness should be your utmost priority.
Make sure you don’t publish the same content on different websites.
If you rewrite the article by changing some of its sentences and send it to different publishers, it will still be considered as duplicate content to the original one and you will be punished badly for doing so.
4. Using Unnatural Anchor Text
Anchor text refers to the blue text that carries the link to your target page.
The word you choose for anchor text affects user behavior when they are about to click on that.
Using unnatural and irrelevant anchor text may confuse the readers and they may not feel like clicking on that site.
The result?
Your page will not get enough visitors and soon you will start to lose your ranking.
5. Linking Only to Homepage
Do all the backlinks you have got so far link to your homepage?
Then you might be in trouble.
While doing link building, you should make sure that the links you’re getting get links to different pages of your site.
Linking to your homepage only will make the whole link building process spammy and leads to poor conversion on your site.
If you have related products or blog pages, getting links for them will make it more natural.
Final Thoughts
Link building is crucial for SEO. However, to get the best result, you should know the right way to do it.
Since it’s an ever-changing process, what works today may become taboo tomorrow.
However, no matter what you do, you should think about the reader, as well as Google.
Google always gives its users the highest priority and will definitely penalize you if any of your activities hamper the user experience.
So, before you start link building for your site, you should have a clear idea about what you should do and what not.
It’s really hard to find quality backlinks building service. Here in OneLittleWeb, we try our best to offer the highest quality link-building service. You can check our link-building service
Sujan Sarkar is the Co-founder of OnelittleWeb, a leading SEO agency specializing in helping businesses improve their online presence and search engine rankings.
