When it comes to search engine optimisation, link building remains a fundamental practice. Despite being a relatively old strategy, it’s still effective at helping brands, and companies generate more traffic while expanding their online presence. There are various methods and techniques to build links, with every website needing different tactics to cater to specific requirements. However, it isn’t uncommon for mistakes to happen. At times, it may even result in penalties leading to losses in search rankings and web traffic.
For this reason, it’s best to avoid missteps from the outset. But as they say, the first step to steering away from traps is knowing where they are, and listed below are some mistakes in link building you should keep away from at all costs.
1. Forgoing professional services
In an effort to keep costs low, some organisations give into the temptation of keeping as much work in-house as possible. However, this can have the opposite of the intended result, as having to shoulder the responsibility instead of outsourcing may require you to financially cover additional salaries, health benefits, equipment, and training. Moreover, the company will be at risk of errors and oversights that may kill its chances of successfully building links and create potentially irreparable setbacks.
Therefore, it’s best to hire a link building agency to help you achieve all your objectives, like ocere.com. In this way, not only will you avoid overburdening your business and enable it to focus on its priorities, but you won’t have to invest a considerable amount of financial resources, resulting in greater returns.
2. Buying links
Once a widespread and notorious practice in the 2000s, link buying is a black hat technique that many organisations still try to do today. Unfortunately, while it may be able to provide short-term gains, it will lead to penalties that can permanently keep you from reaching favourable search rankings and undoing everything you’ve worked so hard for. Therefore, you must avoid purchasing links. Instead, earn them by searching for relevant sites and delivering top-quality content. It may take you more time to do, but it’ll lead to much better results and help your business succeed.
3. Generic or poor email pitches
An excellent email pitch is essential to the success of any link-building endeavour. After all, it ultimately decides whether the webmaster of the site you’re looking to gain links from will respond favourably to your digital correspondence. Unfortunately, many times, organisations settle for templated and generic emails that inspire any interest or response from the recipients. And because these pitches are essentially your first step into building a mutually beneficial, collaborative venture, you need to write a meaningful message.
One tip is to personalise email outreach because it will enable you to promote the pitch while establishing excellent rapport at the outset. Try to also focus your pitches on addressing specific concerns, not unlike a sales pitch. Being able to cater to particular needs will allow you to establish better the connection you seek instead of breaking it away.
4. Spamming links
Another popular black hat strategy is link spamming. As its name implies, this is the practice of flooding comments, online forums, and guest posts with poor quality or even harmful sites. It’s a relatively common sight but an easy pattern to recognise, making it easy to penalise by search engines like Google. Spamming anchor texts on published material is another problem that you need to avoid because it can lead to lower search rankings. Thankfully, it’s not a hard practice to avoid. All you need to do is make sure that your anchor text and links are incorporated naturally into your content.
5. Not connecting with webmasters
Contrary to popular belief, link-building isn’t merely about promoting your content through other sites. It’s also a way to establish networks while forming advantageous partnerships with services and websites. If you don’t try to connect with and create relationships with the websites, you won’t be able to maximise your opportunities to create brand exposure and awareness. So be sure to take the time to connect with them.
Conclusion
Like many other search engine optimisation strategies, effort and time are necessary for successfully building links. Making mistakes like cutting corners will only keep you from your goals, which is the reason why it’s important to know what they are so you can avoid them. More importantly, it will encourage you to find ways to optimise your strategies.