Have you ever asked yourself why link-building is emphasized so much? On every SEO blog you stumble upon, there is always a section dedicated to link building. Why is that? 

Well, when search engine algorithms see your website being linked to by another website, they see it as a vote of confidence in your content. Quality backlinks have been proven time and again to be one of the best ways to increase your website’s ranking for search terms. 

Considering how important getting backlinks is, it’s surprising how website admins and business owners make a lot of mistakes in their attempts to gain them. Let’s explore three of them in this article.

1. Being Satisfied With Backlinks from Spammy Websites

Also known as an inbound link, a backlink refers to a hyperlink found on external websites that leads to your website when clicked. 

It is a great asset to receive backlinks, as it indicates your content was deemed good enough to be linked to. As far as possible, you want your backlinks to be from sources that are related to your niche and have great authority.

Your website can attract backlinks naturally when your content is informative enough to be recognized based on its own merit. You can also win backlinks through deliberate strategies.

These strategies include:

  • Blogger outreach and relationship building
  • Broken link building
  • Guest blogging
  • Social media promotion
  • Being active in online communities related to your niche

Typically, backlinks that are allowed on a website without any editorial control aren’t of the highest quality. Google’s ‘Penguin’ is adept at assessing backlink quality and will dole out ranking penalties. Thus, be extra careful about how you go about securing backlinks. You want to look for reputed SEO services that can build backlinks the right way. 

According to Southtown Web Design, an ideal link-building process would involve an intake, where SEO experts review your anchor text and destination URL. The next step would be outreach, where the focus would be on finding the most relevant blogs that can be selected. 

Once an ideal blog has been found, a high-quality article is drafted, edited, and sent for submission. Once the link is live, you will be provided a report that contains the URL for you to review.  

2. Paying for Backlinks

You can find many people on the internet offering paid link-building services. You will be promised a boost in traffic, and yes, traffic will increase but only for a moment.

Going this route is a highway to getting penalized by search engines. 

Google is really good at spotting unnatural links and will levy the Penguin penalty on your website. Google doesn’t like it when sponsored links are passed as natural links. Instead, it has always preferred links that lead to quality content. 

Search engines care a lot about stopping the proliferation of sponsored backlinks. This is because it directly impacts the browsing experience for normal users. It may come as a surprise, but people don’t really like every link they click, leading them to a commercial proposition. 

3. Lack of a Link Building Strategy

It should be fairly obvious now that buying and spamming your way to backlinks is not the way to go. You need a clear and structured strategy that provides you with long-term benefits. Without a good link-building strategy, it is possible to waste time pursuing low-quality and irrelevant backlinks with little SEO value.

Moreover, you end up with wildly inconsistent results. Sometimes, it feels like what you are doing is indeed working, only for the results to suddenly dwindle to nothing. If you are wondering how to go about creating a good link-building strategy, the first thing you want to do is a complete audit of existing content. 

This will give you clues as to what your overarching goal should be. For instance, if you discover that the quality of your content is severely lacking, your strategy should focus on how to address those concerns. 

You could research and brainstorm the types of articles that will offer value to readers. Similarly, you can look at analytics and understand what content needs to be trimmed. Alternatively, check if existing content can still be salvaged and reworked. 

Content auditing is but the first step, of course. A good link-building strategy will include aspects such as guest blogging, broken link building,  link reclamation, blog commenting, and contributing to crowdsourced posts. Your creativity is the only limit in terms of finding good link-building strategies.

Conclusion

Remember, a good link-building strategy is something that you will need to routinely assess. Getting good results from link building is similar to progress made in the gym. 

The best results come from compound exercises in the gym. Similarly, try to focus on offering value through the compound equivalent of SEO. This would be your content quality, professional outreach, and organic content promotion. 

Paid backlinks will work in the short term, but if you are serious about long-term growth, you want to focus on becoming an authority in your niche.